Computer Trivia Questions for College Students — page 3

Adding more basis functions in a linear model, pick the most probably option:

• ADoesn't affect bias and variance
• BDecreases model bias
• CDecreases variance
• DDecreases estimation bias

Statement 1| The original ResNets and Transformers are feedforward neural networks. Statement 2| The original Transformers use self-attention, but the original ResNet does not.

• AFalse, False
• BTrue, True
• CFalse, True
• DTrue, False

Based on the paper "Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain", which of the following statements are true? "Spammers" here refer to operators of various parts of the "spam value chain."

• ASpammers run their spam-advertised web sites on compromised user machines that are part of a botnet.
• BSpammers need to register domain names in order for their spam-based advertisements to be effective.
• CB and C
• DThere is a high cost for spammers to switch acquiring banks.

If N is the number of instances in the training dataset, nearest neighbors has a classification run time of

• AO(1)
• BO(log N )
• CO( N )
• DO( N^2 )

The access matrix approach to protection has the difficulty that

• Adeciding whether a process has access to a resource is undecidable
• Bit is not capable of expressing complex protection requirements
• Cthere is no way to express who has rights to change the access matrix itself
• Dthe matrix, if stored directly, is large and can be clumsy to manage

Which of the following is a clustering algorithm in machine learning?

• AGaussian Naïve Bayes
• BCART
• CExpectation Maximization
• DApriori

Statement 1| Highway networks were introduced after ResNets and eschew max pooling in favor of convolutions. Statement 2| DenseNets usually cost more memory than ResNets.

• ATrue, True
• BFalse, False
• CTrue, False
• DFalse, True

Statement 1| The softmax function is commonly used in mutliclass logistic regression. Statement 2| The temperature of a nonuniform softmax distribution affects its entropy.

• AFalse, True
• BFalse, False
• CTrue, True
• DTrue, False

Statement 1| If there exists a set of k instances that cannot be shattered by H, then VC(H) < k. Statement 2| If two hypothesis classes H1 and H2 satisfy H1 ⊆ H2, then VC(H1) ≤ VC(H2).

• AFalse, True
• BTrue, False
• CTrue, True
• DFalse, False

Which one of the following is the main reason for pruning a Decision Tree?

• ATo avoid overfitting the training set
• BTo make the training set error smaller
• CTo save computing time during testing
• DTo save space for storing the Decision Tree

Statement 1| A neural network's convergence depends on the learning rate. Statement 2| Dropout multiplies randomly chosen activation values by zero.

• ATrue, False
• BTrue, True
• CFalse, False
• DFalse, True

What is a web proxy?

• AAn agent that makes decisions on the client's behalf when interacting with web applications
• BA piece of software that makes a web application look like a standalone application, making it easier to test
• CA piece of software that intercepts and possibly modifies requests (and responses) between a web browser and web server
• DA simulator for the web, for use when off-line

Which is true about Batch Normalization?

• ABatch Normalization is equivalent to Layer Normalization for convolutional neural networks.
• BAfter applying batch normalization, the layer's activations will follow a standard Gaussian distribution.
• CThe bias parameter of affine layers becomes redundant if a batch normalization layer follows immediately afterward.
• DThe standard weight initialization must be changed when using Batch Normalization.

Consider the representation of six-bit numbers by two's complement, one's complement, or by sign and magnitude. In which representation is there overflow from the addition of the integers 011000 and 011000?

• ATwo's complement only
• BSign and magnitude and one's complement only
• CTwo's complement and one's complement only
• DAll three representations

Which of the following is true of interrupts?

• AThey are generated when memory cycles are "stolen".
• BThey are used in place of data channels.
• CThey cannot be generated by arithmetic operations.
• DThey can indicate completion of an I/O operation.

Which of the following are benefits of penetration testing?

• ACompositionality of security properties means tested components are secure even if others change
• BFull evidence of security: a clean test means a secure system
• CResults are often reproducible
• DMakes an adversarial neural network converge more quickly

What is ethical hacking?

• AHacking systems (e.g., during penetration testing) to expose vulnerabilities so they can be fixed, rather than exploited
• B"Hacking" ethics so they justify unintended selfish behavior
• CHacking into systems run by those whose ethics you disagree with
• DA slang term for rapid software development, e.g., as part of hackathons

Statement 1| The ID3 algorithm is guaranteed to find the optimal decision tree. Statement 2| Consider a continuous probability distribution with density f() that is nonzero everywhere. The probability of a value x is equal to f(x).

• AFalse, False
• BTrue, False
• CTrue, True
• DFalse, True

Which of the following is not a block cipher operating mode?

• ACBF
• BECB
• CCBC
• DCFB

Suppose you want to use fuzzing on a program to try to find memory errors; which of the following statements is true?

• AYou should not use a grammar-based fuzzer, because its adherence to the grammar means it will not find memory errors
• BCompiling the program with address sanitizer (ASAN) will make errors harder to reproduce
• CFuzzing doesn't find memory errors, it finds crashes and hangs
• DCompiling the program with address sanitizer (ASAN) will make the source of a memory error easier to find

Let T (n) be defined by T(1) = 7 and T(n + 1) = 3n + T(n) for all integers n ≥ 1. Which of the following represents the order of growth of T(n) as a function of n?

• AΘ(n)
• BΘ(n^2)
• CΘ(n^2 log n)
• DΘ(n log n)

The IP protocol is primarily concerned with

• AReliable delivery of large (multi-packet) messages between machines that are not necessarily directly connected
• BReliable delivery of packets between directly connected machines
• CDealing with differences among operating system architectures
• DRouting packets through the network

Another term for out-of-distribution detection is?

• Aone-class detection
• Banomaly detection
• Ctrain-test mismatch robustness
• Dbackground detection

Which of the following statements is FALSE about memory reclamation based on reference counting?

• AReference counting is well suited for reclaiming cyclic structures.
• BReference counting need not keep track of which cells point to other cells.
• CReference counting incurs additional space overhead for each memory cell.
• DReference counting is an alternative to mark-and-sweep garbage collection.

What was the first buffer overflow attack?

• ALove Bug
• BMorris Worm
• CSQL Slammer
• DCode Red

An integer c is a common divisor of two integers x and y if and only if c is a divisor of x and c is a divisor of y. Which of the following sets of integers could possibly be the set of all common divisors of two integers?

• A{-6, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 6}
• B{-6, -3, -2, -1, 1, 2, 3, 6}
• C{-6, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 6}
• D{-6,-2, -1, 1, 2, 6}

In Message Condentiality, the transmitted message must make sense to only intended

• ASender
• BReceiver
• CTranslator
• DModulor

For polynomial regression, which one of these structural assumptions is the one that most affects the trade-off between underfitting and overfitting:

• AWhether we learn the weights by matrix inversion or gradient descent
• BThe use of a constant-term unit input
• CThe polynomial degree
• DThe assumed variance of the Gaussian noise

Statement 1| The F1 score can be especially useful for datasets with class high imbalance. Statement 2| The area under the ROC curve is one of the main metrics used to assess anomaly detectors.

• AFalse, False
• BFalse, True
• CTrue, True
• DTrue, False

Statement 1| The Stanford Sentiment Treebank contained movie reviews, not book reviews. Statement 2| The Penn Treebank has been used for language modeling.

• AFalse, False
• BTrue, False
• CTrue, True
• DFalse, True

Computational complexity of Gradient descent is,

• Alinear in D
• Blinear in N
• Cdependent on the number of iterations
• Dpolynomial in D

Suppose we like to calculate P(H|E, F) and we have no conditional independence information. Which of the following sets of numbers are sufficient for the calculation?

• AP(H), P(E|H), P(F|H)
• BP(E, F), P(E|H), P(F|H)
• CP(E, F), P(H), P(E|H), P(F|H)
• DP(E, F), P(H), P(E, F|H)

When the data must arrive at the receiver exactly as they were sent, its called

• AMessage Integrity
• BMessage Condentiality
• CMessage Splashing
• DMessage Sending

Which of the following statements about Naive Bayes is incorrect?

• AAttributes can be nominal or numeric
• BAttributes are equally important.
• CAttributes are statistically independent of one another given the class value.
• DAttributes are statistically dependent of one another given the class value.

For a Gaussian Bayes classifier, which one of these structural assumptions is the one that most affects the trade-off between underfitting and overfitting:

• AWhether we assume full class covariance matrices or diagonal class covariance matrices
• BWhether we learn the class centers by Maximum Likelihood or Gradient Descent
• CWhether we allow classes to have different mean vectors or we force them to share the same mean vector
• DWhether we have equal class priors or priors estimated from the data.

When doing least-squares regression with regularisation (assuming that the optimisation can be done exactly), increasing the value of the regularisation parameter λ the testing error.

• Awill never decrease the training error.
• Bwill never increase the training error.
• Cwill never decrease the testing error.
• Dwill never increase

Of the following page-replacement policies, which is guaranteed to incur the minimum number of page faults?

• AReplace the page whose most recent reference was the longest time in the past.
• BReplace the page whose next reference will be the longest time in the future.
• CReplace the page whose most recent reference was the shortest time in the past.
• DReplace the page whose next reference will be the shortest time in the future.

Statement 1| The ReLU's gradient is zero for $x<0$, and the sigmoid gradient $\sigma(x)(1-\sigma(x))\le \frac{1}{4}$ for all $x$. Statement 2| The sigmoid has a continuous gradient and the ReLU has a discontinuous gradient.

• ATrue, True
• BFalse, True
• CTrue, False
• DFalse, False

Which of the following guidelines is applicable to initialization of the weight vector in a fully connected neural network.

• AShould set it to zero in order to preserve symmetry across all neurons
• BShould set it to zero since otherwise it causes a bias
• CShould not set it to zero since otherwise it will cause overfitting
• DShould not set it to zero since otherwise (stochastic) gradient descent will explore a very small space

Statement 1| Maximizing the likelihood of logistic regression model yields multiple local optimums. Statement 2| No classifier can do better than a naive Bayes classifier if the distribution of the data is known.

• ATrue, False
• BFalse, True
• CFalse, False
• DTrue, True

Which of the following comes closest to being a perfectly secure encryption scheme?

• AEnigma, a transposition cipher
• BThe Caesar Cipher, a substitution cipher
• CDES (Data Encryption Standard), a symmetric-key algorithm
• DOne-time pad

Why apps developed in languages like C, C++ is prone to Buffer-overflow?

• ANo database check
• BNo string boundary checks in predefined functions
• CNo processing power check
• DNo storage check in the external memory

Statement 1| RELUs are not monotonic, but sigmoids are monotonic. Statement 2| Neural networks trained with gradient descent with high probability converge to the global optimum.

• AFalse, False
• BTrue, True
• CFalse, True
• DTrue, False

How is IP address spoofing detected?

• AComparing the TTL values of the actual and spoofed addresses
• BIdentify all TCP sessions that are initiated but does not complete successfully
• CInstalling and configuring a IDS that can read the IP header
• DImplementing a firewall to the network

Many cryptographic protocols base their security on assumptions about the computational difficulty of integer factorization. Integer factorization serves this purpose because we believe that

• Atesting primality is computationally intractable
• Binteger multiplication is a function whose inverse, factorization, remains difficult for a large class of inputs
• Ceven if P = NP, integer factorization is still likely not to be polynomial-time computable
• DP = NP

The K-means algorithm:

• AConverges to the global optimum if and only if the initial means are chosen as some of the samples themselves
• BRequires the dimension of the feature space to be no bigger than the number of samples
• CMinimizes the within class variance for a given number of clusters
• DHas the smallest value of the objective function when K = 1

Local caching of files is common in distributed file systems, but it has the disadvantage that

• ATemporary inconsistencies among views of a file by different machines can result
• BA much higher amount of network traffic results
• CCaching makes file migration impossible
• DThe file system is likely to be corrupted when a computer crashes

Given two Boolean random variables, A and B, where P(A) = 1/2, P(B) = 1/3, and P(A | ¬B) = 1/4, what is P(A | B)?

• A1/6
• B3/4
• C1
• D1/4

Statement 1| For any two variables x and y having joint distribution p(x, y), we always have H[x, y] ≥ H[x] + H[y] where H is entropy function. Statement 2| For some directed graphs, moralization decreases the number of edges present in the graph.

• ATrue, False
• BFalse, True
• CTrue, True
• DFalse, False

Suppose you are given an EM algorithm that finds maximum likelihood estimates for a model with latent variables. You are asked to modify the algorithm so that it finds MAP estimates instead. Which step or steps do you need to modify?

• ABoth
• BMaximization
• CExpectation
• DNo modification necessary