Sef-plagiarism?

One of the courses that we are required to take for the Masters of Science in Computer Science program that I am undertaking is called Seminar. It is a single credit course that needs to be taken three times. Each time the student, with the supervision of his instructor, picks a research paper which the student then researches, attempting to confirm or explore the results of the paper, and then presents the paper to the class. In addition to the presentation is a written report on the subject outlining what they have learned from the paper. As anybody reading this blog already knows, I am developing an Atari 2600 emulator. The sound emulation, to do properly, requires something called a Looped-Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) which is similar to a poly-counter which is one of the earliest ways of generating pseudo-random numbers. This had me looking into random number generation in general. One of the papers I was very impressed with is “PCG: A Family of Simple Fast Space-Efficient Statistically Good Algorithms for Random Number Generation.” The link to this paper is http://www.pcg-random.org/paper.html and while it is a very lengthy paper, it is not too technical and goes over a lot of details about random number generation in general in addition to presenting a new family of random number generators.

I am planning on going over this paper in three separate articles. First, a look at what a random number is and what makes a good random number generator. Next, how the generators are tested as well as a less-robust testing method that would work for the type of things I need to do. Finally, we will look at the PCG algorithm.

I am going to start this series of articles in four weeks with next fortnight being a week “off” though I may post something if I have the time. The reason for the delay is something known as self-plagiarism. To me this is a really strange concept to me, but some Universities will actually consider using your own material in a paper to be a form of plagiarism. To get around this possibility I am going to wait until my report has been submitted and  use that report as the reference to the blog so it is important that the report be submitted before I start posting the blog. This is probably me being way over-paranoid but it is better to be safe than sorry.

In the meantime, I urge you to get a copy of the paper and read it. See you in a fortnight or two.