Category Archives: Research Blog

Sharon and I have finally concluded, for now, our work on the maximally dense segment problem (download the draft here), on which we have been working on and off for the past two years. Considering the algorithm itself and its derivation/proofs, I am quite happy with what we have achieved. The algorithm is rather complex, however, and it is a challenge presenting it in an accessible way. Sharon has done a great job polishing the paper, and I do hope more people would be interested in reading it and it would, eventually, inspire more work on interesting program derivations.

In a previous paper of mine, regrettably, I wrongly attributed the origin of the maximum segment sum problem to Dijkstra and Feijen’s Een methode van programmeren. In fact, the story behind the problem was told very well in Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls.

I learned the function derivation of the maximum segment sum problem from one of Jeremy’s papers and was very amazed. It was perhaps one of the early incident that inspired my interest in program calculation.