EMCS Holiday Trivia

Get things right - Get a prize...

The term "bit" is a portmanteau(port-man-toe) – it combines what two other words?

"Binary" and "digit"

Large language models have been said to have “sparks of AGI” – what does AGI stand for?

Artificial General Intelligence

The "Escape" key was invented long before windowed interfaces. What was it invented for inputting?

The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for programmers to switch from one kind of code to another.

The “Demoscene” was started by software developers who removed copy protection and other restrictions from existing software, adding their own ‘cracktros’ to claim credit for their hacks. What kind of software were they predominantly cracking?

Computer Games

At Bell Labs in 1969, a programmer named Brian Kernighan wrote a code snippet in his “A Tutorial Introduction to the B Programming Language”. This tutorial is the first known instance of a famous two-word phrase used in countless programming tutorials. What is the phrase?

Hello, World!

Named after a philosopher who specialized in indirect self-reference, what is the term for a program that outputs its own source code?

A quine program, or quine

A phrase attributed to several different people goes: “Java is to JavaScript as ham is to ____ ?

hamster

JavaScript has had at least three names associated with it since it was created. Name at least one.

Mocha, LiveScript, JScript, ECMAScript, ES

What character on every modern keyboard goes back to at least the 1500s? Its original use was related to the price per unit of physical goods.

‘at’ @ Smithsonian reports, the first documented use was in the 1500s for denoting units of wine (called amphorae), but our use of the symbol probably comes from a speedily written French "à" (which translates to "at")

Why do programmers confuse OCT 31 = DEC 25 ?

(OCTal 31 = DECimal 25)

What company made the first portable computer in 1981?

The first portable computer, the Osborne 1, was made by Osborne Computer Corporation.

What is the best-selling video game ever as of 2023?

As of 2023, the best-selling video game ever is Minecraft, known for its sandbox gameplay and creativity.

Kubernetes was not named Kubernetes until it was open sourced by Google in 2014. Prior to that, it was known by what four-letter name of an alien species in the "Star Trek" franchise?

Borg

In 2005, Linus Torvalds created software for tracking changes on files to improve development of the Linux kernel. Since 2005, the open-source software has had Junio Hamano as the core maintainer. What is the three-letter name of this uber-popular software among developers?

Git

After Microsoft and IBM, which Texas-based computer tech corp (known for its databases) is the third largest in the world?

Oracle Corporation, renowned for its database software and technology.

What "P" word can describe both a square sewn over a hole in clothing, or a set of changes to update, fix, or improve a software program?

Patch

What is the name of the software framework developed and maintained by Microsoft that was first built in the late 1990s and continues to primarily run on Windows machines with the C# language?

The .NET Framework, which provides a controlled environment for developing and running applications.

What company providing hosting for software development and distributed version control familiar to computer programmers is known for its iconic Octocat (part cat, part octopus) logo?

GitHub, a platform for version control and collaboration that allows multiple developers to work on projects simultaneously.

What British woman is considered to have written the first ever piece of computer software, developing an algorithm for Charles Babbage’s theoretical Analytical Engine in the 1840s? She was the only child of George Gordon, Lord Byron, she is best known with an “L” last name.

Ada Lovelace, recognized for her pioneering work in computer programming and mathematics, particularly her notes on Babbage's machine.

What programming language got its one-letter name because it came after a language that was named either “Byte” or “Bell” but was just called “B”?

C, a general-purpose programming language that supports structured programming and is widely used for system and application software.

What cybersecurity term meshes the words “software” and “malicious” together to describe bad programs that are used to infect a system?

Malware, short for malicious software, refers to any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network.

What programming language started out as a personal project of Gradyon Hoare when he was working at Mozilla Research in 2006 and was apparently named after fungus and not corroded metal?

Rust, a systems programming language designed for safety and performance, particularly in concurrent programming.

What term beginning with F is an automated software testing method that injects invalid, malformed, or unexpected inputs into a system to reveal software defects and vulnerabilities?

Fuzzer - Fuzz testing, a technique used to discover vulnerabilities in software by inputting random data to crash programs or expose flaws.

What term, beginning with H, is software that enables distributed processing for big data by using clusters and simple programming models?

Hadoop, an open-source framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models.

Also used to describe the effects of some psychoactive drugs on humans, when applied to software, what term means that an AI model has produced an answer that is plausible, but factually incorrect and/or unrelated to the question asked?

Hallucination, a phenomenon where AI generates responses that are misleading or inaccurate despite sounding reasonable.