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slightly new combination".42 These types of activities, Dr.
McDermott claimed, are distinguishable from what he identified as
"cookbook" results--"where past practice has codified a way of
solving problems of a certain kind, and it requires no creativity
or experimentation to apply that method to a new problem of that
kind."
Dr. McDermott claimed that a computer science project is
considered research if it has "a significant chance of failure due
to uncertainty regarding questions of computer science". He
further identified eight types of uncertainty that when present can
result in a project's characterization as research: (1) Ill
definedness--the inability to formally define a problem to be
solved; (2) time and space complexity--lack of sufficient computing
power due to growth in data that requires an exponential growth in
computing power; (3) intractability--the inability of a program to
work with many different data sets; (4) software engineering--the
management of complex programming projects; (5) architectural
constraints--the process by which the computer completes its tasks;
(6) asynchronousness--the organization of several computers
operating in widely separated places; (7) security--the proper
authority to enter a system; and (8) user engineering--the
friendliness of a computer to the user. Dr. McDermott estimated
42 Dr. McDermott conceded that the work performed by
Norwest on the eight sample activities would not produce
publishable results for a textbook on algorithms.
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