Would it be possible to specifically mail those who were rejected?I do understand it would be time consuming for you guys, it would be really helpful to all
Stanislaw lem.. i agree... Solaris was special.. and most purists seemed to suggest the translation from Polish was bad!... Olaf stapledon's last and first men, starMaker were both stunning...
Ursula le guin also come to mind
I did GSoc for Freenet and hopefully will find more time to contribute to it.If money werent an issue,i would be working full time on the kernel and Freenet, but unfortunately it is :P
Quite a long list actually and hard to put in words.... Functional programming in general..especially its roots( halting problem, church's thesisetc...),reading about ENIAC .... small-world problem(miligram) and modelling such networks,beauty of primes and number theoretic algorithms,quantum mechanics. Several books have also influenced deeply...textbooks/sci-fi/cyberpunk...works of hofstadter,stephenson etc....
Same feelings... but its only recently i started playing GO more often( after a hacker gifted his GO board to me )so maybe i'll get better... prior to that, it was only CHESS
I finished my UG last year from India, but participated in several OPC's( Online prog contests) winning a few. I also represented my Univ in IBM-ICPC(Inter collegiate prog contest).. all of these were wonderful experiences.Trying out such problems really helps ... and increases your understanding of algorithm complexity and related literature... Google Summer of code during the last year of Univ was also fun.. albeit a different kind of experience...nonetheless taught me a lot. Both me,and my teammate during these code contests who was also a high performer in TC and currently work at different startups. I genuinely believe these experiences definitely made us better hackers.