A fictitious guest writer named bhOndOO has agreed to keep our site active with humorous articles during the end semester examinations. He claims to be a student researcher at IIT Madras. Find all the articles of the series here.
bhOndOO is a Computer Science student at IIT Madras. bhOndOO’s professors just love giving assignments. Sometimes, bhOndOO thinks that if his professors have nothing to do, they give assignments. Maintaining sanity while working on assignments of four courses is not easy. Nowadays, bhOndOO is careful about submitting assignments because he once sent his Computer Graphics (CS6360) assignment to the Geometry & Photometry-based Computer Vision (CS6790) professor. He realized it only when he got 1/10 while Mani who copied his assignment got 8/10. It is rumoured that the Geometry professor liked the 3D view of the objects and hence allotted one mark.
bhOndOO has Advanced Algorithms (CS6841) exam day after tomorrow but he is working on the Computer Architecture (CS6600) assignment because he has to submit it before 00:00 tonight. He has taken the readings from Shami. Shami has taken the readings from Gullu and written a script to modify the values randomly by a value between -2.3 and 2.3. The script is in great demand tonight. bhOndOO thinks that he should do the modifications to the readings manually because he is sceptical about the range (-2.3 to 2.3) despite Shami’s multiple attempts to make him understand. bhOndOO’s argument is that since there are 47 students in the class apart from him, if he uses the script, the readings will randomly match with at least one person in the class.
bhOndOO has done the modifications and needs to plot the graph. He has overheard that one needs to use gnuplot. He is now reading http://www.gnuplot.info. Another hour has passed by. He has plotted the graph. Though it is not as smooth as Gullu’s graph, he is not really bothered. He is only worried that the submission that needs to be done within the next three hours.
“bhOndOO, coffee?”
Though it was supposed to be a question, bhOndOO heard it more like an order and followed Mani and Shami. He was back at the lab entrance within 15 minutes. As they entered the lab, they realized that the lab was empty! What happened?
Mani: Did everyone go for coffee?
Shami: Assignment submission postponed?
bhOndOO: Bomb?
Suddenly, one of them sees a big crowd in the corner at BenJi’s desk.
“What’s the matter?”
“BenJi has found a link to a student’s homepage at UIUC who kept his assignments on his homepage and …”
Within the next half an hour, half of the lab gets empty.
bhOndOO’s conscience is like a calamity – it pops up when most unwanted. “Taking readings is fine, but copying the whole assignments is not good. I will only refer to the answers to check whether mine are correct.” Two hours are remaining.
There are ten questions that need to be answered from the graph. bhOndOO solves the first one and is very happy to check that it is correct. Now, he does calculations for the second and gets an answer of 64 Kilobytes. He is not happy. He knows that the answer should be 32 Kilobytes. Well, he had mistakenly seen the answer to the second question while looking at the first answer. He thinks for a while and tries to divide every quantity in his calculations by two but nothing sounds logical. He looks around, sees that everyone is busy with their assignments, and modifies his answer to 32 Kilobytes.
Out of the ten, he answers three questions on his own and copies seven. It is 23:50. He tar-gzips his files and sends it by email to the professor at 23:58. His conscience is not allowing him to be happy but he feels okay that he would at least get good marks.
Everyone else in the lab is now doing one of the following:
— using Facebook
— chatting
— blogging or reading blogs
— reading Quora
bhOndOO looks around and thinks about spending some time surfing the internet before going to hostel. He looks back at his screen. He finds the homepage of the UIUC student. He reads his main page, publications (which is empty), photos and bookmarks. From bookmarks, he reaches the course webpage for Computer Architecture. There are class timings, first midterm paper, assignment sheet 1, answer and … marks! He clicks and sees a list of 30 students and their marks. His eye searches for the word “Christopher” and finds that the column next to the word contains zero.
Note: All the stories published in this series are works of fiction. bhOndOO and the other characters in the stories bear no reference to real individuals.
