"Expeditions in Computing awards" are ten million dollar NSF grants from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering to pursue long-term research agendas. My favorite kinds of projects: high risk, high reward, and long term. Today the first four award winners have been announced. The winning programs are
- Open Programmable Mobile Internet 2020
- The Molecular Programming Project
- Understanding, Coping with and Benefiting from Intractibility
- Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society
Of note for the theoretical computer science crowd is the third of these, won by a Princeton area team (lead by Sanjeev Arora), which is going to establish a "Center for Intractability" at Princeton. Very cool. And now I know where to go if I ever need a traveling salesman.
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In my discussion with Sal Cordova in this post, one point came up which I thought was interesting, and worth taking the time to flesh out as a separate post. It's about the distinction
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As noted by Lance, the new journal ACM Transactions on Computation Theory is now accepting papers. Note for quantum computing theorists:
And now I know where to go if I ever need a traveling salesman.
Yes, but what's the most efficient way to get there?
"Yes, but what's the most efficient way to get there?"
There isn't one; the problem is intractable.
P.S. It's 'intractability' and not 'intractibility.'
"Yes, but what's the most efficient way to get there?"
There isn't one; the problem is intractable.
Of course there is a most efficient way to get there; the difficulty is identifying the route. Or more precisely: how to get there and visit your collaborators at umpteen other institutes all in the same trip.
with videoconferencing you don't have to worry about getting there any more.