WAEC Computer Science 2021
Questions & Answers

Neuromorphic chips are designed to emulate the structure and function of biological neural networks in the human brain, enabling energy-efficient parallel processing for AI tasks like pattern recognition, unlike traditional von Neumann architectures.

Neural signal sensors, such as EEG electrodes or invasive implants, capture brain activity to translate thoughts into commands, forming the core of BCI systems for applications like prosthetics control.

A DAO uses smart contracts on blockchain to automate governance and decision-making without central authority, allowing community-driven operations like fund allocation in a transparent manner.

Functional programming emphasizes immutable data, preventing unintended modifications and side effects, which reduces bugs and enhances security in concurrent and distributed systems.

Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party to prove knowledge of a value without disclosing it, crucial for privacy-preserving authentication in protocols like zk-SNARKs used in cryptocurrencies.

Photonic computing uses photons for data processing and transmission, offering higher speeds and lower energy use compared to electron-based systems, ideal for data centers.

Federated learning trains models across decentralized devices, keeping data local to address privacy concerns, while aggregating updates centrally for a global model.

Cypher is a declarative query language specifically for graph databases like Neo4j, allowing efficient traversal and pattern matching in connected data structures.

A digital twin is a virtual model of a physical asset, enabling real-time simulation, predictive maintenance, and optimization in manufacturing and IoT.

The Radio Access Network (RAN) handles wireless communication between user devices and the core network, supporting high-speed, low-latency connections in 5G.

GANs consist of a generator creating synthetic data and a discriminator evaluating it, leading to realistic outputs like images in applications such as deepfakes.

Flexible displays use organic LEDs or e-ink on bendable substrates, enabling foldable smartphones and wearable devices with enhanced portability.

Sharding distributes data horizontally across shards on multiple servers, improving scalability and performance for large databases like those in NoSQL systems.

Holographic communication projects 3D images for immersive interactions, enhancing remote collaboration in fields like telemedicine and virtual meetings.

QKD uses quantum properties like entanglement to generate and distribute encryption keys securely, detecting any eavesdropping attempts instantaneously.

Side-channel attacks exploit physical implementations, such as timing or power consumption, to extract keys from quantum cryptographic devices.

Synthetic data generators produce realistic datasets to augment limited real data, preserving privacy and enabling training in scenarios with scarce or sensitive information.

Self-healing networks use AI and automation to identify issues like link failures and reroute traffic or repair configurations without human intervention.

Homomorphic encryption allows arithmetic operations on ciphertexts, yielding encrypted results that match operations on plaintexts, enabling secure cloud computing.

Alexa, developed by Amazon, responds to voice commands for tasks like playing music, controlling smart homes, and answering queries using natural language processing.

Drone swarm algorithms enable collective behavior, such as formation flying or search patterns, through decentralized control inspired by ant colonies or bird flocks.

Biodegradable electronics use materials like silk or cellulose that break down naturally, reducing e-waste in applications like temporary medical implants.

TTL prevents infinite loops by decrementing a counter per hop; when it reaches zero, the packet is discarded, ensuring efficient routing in IP networks.

XAI techniques like LIME or SHAP provide interpretable models, building trust and enabling debugging in critical sectors like healthcare and finance.

Differential privacy adds calibrated noise to datasets, ensuring that the presence or absence of any individual's data does not significantly affect query results.

Terahertz systems operate in the 0.1-10 THz band, enabling terabit-per-second data rates for ultra-high-speed wireless communication, though with propagation challenges.

FSMs represent systems as states, transitions, and events, useful for designing parsers, protocols, and embedded systems with predictable behavior.

STL (Stereolithography) is a standard triangular mesh format for representing 3D model geometry, widely used in additive manufacturing.

Chaos engineering, pioneered by Netflix, injects failures to validate system robustness, identifying weaknesses before they impact users.

Constellations like Starlink deploy thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites for seamless global broadband, minimizing latency compared to geostationary systems.

Biochips combine microfluidics and electronics for lab-on-a-chip applications, enabling rapid diagnostics like DNA analysis or protein detection.

Microgrids provide independent power from renewables, ensuring uptime for data centers during grid failures and integrating efficiently with HPC demands.

Digital watermarking embeds imperceptible markers into images, audio, or video to prove ownership and track unauthorized use without altering perception.

Memristors maintain resistance states after power-off, enabling non-volatile memory denser and faster than flash, with neuromorphic computing potential.

Gossip protocols propagate information via random peer exchanges, achieving eventual consistency scalably in systems like Cassandra databases.

Apache Kafka handles high-throughput, fault-tolerant streaming of event data in real-time, used for log aggregation and analytics pipelines.

Tools like Autopsy or EnCase analyze disk images and memory dumps to reconstruct incidents, preserving chain of custody for legal proceedings.

Post-quantum algorithms, like lattice-based cryptography, are designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers capable of breaking RSA and ECC.

Thermal management uses heat sinks, fans, and liquid cooling to dissipate heat from dense processors, maintaining performance and preventing thermal throttling.

Space-based solar power collects uninterrupted sunlight in orbit and beams energy via microwaves to Earth, providing constant, clean power without weather dependency.