Today I break Shtetl-Optimized‘s long radio silence with a relatively-exciting announcement: you remember my timeline of computer science history?  Well, MIT students Jason Zhu and Ammar Ammar have now kindly created a website where you can vote on each of the entries, as well as new entries suggested by commenters.  It’s pretty simple: you just register (by entering an email address, username, and password), then upvote each entry you like and downvote each entry you dislike (you can also abstain on any entry).

The voting site arrives just in time for the MIT symposium “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything”, which is happening today and tomorrow.

For reference, here are the 17 new contenders added by popular demand:

150BC Chinese text describes Gaussian elimination
499 Indian mathematician Aryabhata describes the “kuttaka” algorithm for solving Diophantine equations
1206 al-Jazari builds elaborate water clocks and musical automata
1801 The Jacquard loom uses punched cards to control textile manufacturing
1951 Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill describe the concept of closed subroutines
1956 Stephen Kleene invents regular expressions
1962 The Atlas computer begins operation in Manchester
1962 Robert Gallager introduces low-density parity check codes
1968 First deployed packet-switching network
1969 Strassen’s algorithm for fast matrix multiplication
1969 Stephen Wiesner conceives of quantum key distribution
1971 Vapnik and Chervonenkis introduce VC dimension
1982 PostScript
1992 The PCP Theorem
1999 SETI@home
2006 DaVinci surgical robot performs the first unaided operation
2007 Checkers solved

Update: A new feature has been added that lets you rank four randomly-selected entries—click “Done” on the bottom of the page to access it.

Update: You can now undo a vote by clicking twice on the same arrow.