COMP SCI 537 Final: CS 537 UW Madison 11 Fall Final
Document Summary
Please put your name (mandatory) and student id (optional) on this page only. Martin picked up from his desk a proposal for the communication system that his organization was building for the summer olympic games, and went through a sequence of basic calculations. He estimated one key parameter by measuring the time required to send himself a one-character piece of mail. The rest of his numbers were straight from the proposal and therefore quite precise. They showed that, under generous assumptions, the proposed system could work only if there were at least a hundred and twenty seconds in each minute. He sent the design back to the drawing board. This was martin"s wonderful (if eccentric) way of introducing me to back-of-the-envelope calculations. Paraphrased from the back of the envelope by jon bentley. Estimating how long something takes on the back of the envelope is a tried and true engineering technique.
