As part of my thesis research I worked under the direction of a bright Polish professor, who had been working for years on using a mathematical construct called a decision table to analyze computer programs.
Without getting all technical (at this point I barely understand it myself!) suffice to say that I embarked on building an actual processor to use decision table techniques to analyze programs while they were still being designed. If done correctly, this could uncover logic bugs and inefficiencies in the design, long before the actual program was coded.
As an aside, I chose to write the processor in a language called APL. This language is no longer in use, and is extremely cryptic and difficult to master, but had incredibly powerful mathematical and matrix handling capabilities that are still unmatched.
At one point, once my automated processor was working, my advisor suggested that I write a paper about it and submit it to an upcoming national computer conference. (Little did I know then that if I published this work it would no longer be able to be used as my theses — something that I was very angry about later!)
So I wrote and submitted the paper, and it was accepted for publication! As part of this, I was invited to do a live presentation of the paper to a bunch of computer scientists at the conference!
I did so, and by and large received a lot of blank stares, as it was a difficult subject to explain, and the concept was, to most, unbelievable. In any case, I’ve attached the actual paper and the cover of the conference proceedings book in which it was published.
