The Latest in IT Security

HBOs satirical show Silicon Valley begins with a programmer who accidentally develops a radically efficient new algorithm for compressing data. The thing is, the Weissman score didnt exist until Silicon Valleys production team willed it into being. While the show was being developed, actual Stanford professor Tsachy Weissman and then-PhD student Vinith Misra were hired as consultants and charged with creating both the fictional algorithm itself and the metric for ranking it against other algorithms. One researcher at North Carolina State University plans to update his recently published research paper with Weissman scores, while two other professors teaching at Stanford and the University of Santa Barbara, California, plan to incorporate it into their classes, according to IEEE Spectrum.