Hello again CompSoc!

We’re back again with more weekly emails - muhahahaha! Cower in fear, mortals, at the amazing year yet to come.

If you’d like to volunteer to help at our stall in Freshers’ Fair, please contact me so I can share the volunteers’ spreadsheet with you. The more, the merrier! I’ll of course be at the stall as much as I physically can.

This term, we’re introducing a new Learn To Code-style event, CS Essentials, running on Thursdays on weeks 2-8. We also need volunteers for that - contact Serban Slincu who is running it.

Also, we have a Discord! Please feel free to join us! When you join, make sure to ping @Secretary to let me know who you are so I can verify you as a member and you can have access to the general chat.

Cheers,

The CompSoc Committee - Joe G, Edward H, Ben S

Events

Week 0 Geek Night: Welcome (Back)! - 6th October, UGSA

Week 0 will have a casual Geek Night. Bring your laptop for a chill evening of junk food, fizzy drinks and games. This Geek Night is semi-official and has no coding theme. The first theme will be in Week 1’s Geek Night: Wikipedia Game, collaborating with CodeSoc.

Bloomberg Tech Talk: Hashing - 10th October, Lecture Theatre A

Hashing values is an important technique for efficient associative containers. It has multiple independent dimensions of considerations.

None of these considerations is generally well understood. This presentation scratches the surface of the following areas:

• Using hash functions for associative containers.
• Hashing byte sequences into hash values and assessing the quality of hash functions.
• Extracting byte sequences from values and hashing the resulting byte sequences.
• Things to consider for a default hashing function.

The creation of containers and hashing functions is typically done by specialists. The primary intention of discussing them is to give an idea why applications should stay away from custom implementations. On the other hand provision of hash values for user-defined types is rather common-place to support their use as keys of associative containers. Thus, this presentation will have an emphasis on the important aspects for providing hash values for user-defined types:

• The relation between equality and hash values.
• Taking care of sequences to avoid collisions for empty sequences.
• Interaction of hash values between different types (“transparency”).

The code examples use C++. However, the various considerations are language independent and their understanding will be useful when using other programming languages, too.

The Oxford University Computer Society (CompSoc) aims to organise meetings and events for our members to use and further their computing interests. See all of our upcoming events on our Facebook Page or visit our Website for more information about the society.

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