slackenerny

Plan9 was a network operating system, and with a focus on concurrency a new language Alef was designed with coroutines based on CSP formalism (Hoare's communicating sequential processes). That was redesigned in Limbo language on Dis garbage collected virtual machine in plan9's replacement Inferno OS. Go's goroutines and other choices are next incarnation of these ideas designed by many the same Bell Labs people, not just one incidental lead. Shopping for a light compiler to bootstrap from is peripheral to the design story here.

Fuchsia doesn't share as much of the story but does pick up where in Dante's Inferno the original Unix people tried to abandon the root user to redeem themselves almost 30 years ago. Combined with capability based model last seen deployed in the wild with OS/400 and Burroughs machines before that, it would be the first truly new OS in decades.

Book already referenced by GP, click your links. These are old classic conference proceedings edited by Zurek https://archive.org/details/ComplexityEntropyAndThePhysicsOf... but it’s a mixed bag unless you really fancy EG quantum field theorist’s opinions on workings of visual cortex.

Montanari/Mezard perhaps?

A. Hey edited „Feynman Lectures on Computation” for publication and later collected some assorted papers of guest lecturers Feynman would invite in „Feynman and computation – exploring the limits of computers”. This „It from bit” paper by Wheeler (Feynman’s advisor) is the 19th there.

Also, it is prof. Vakil who hosts the MathOverflow site you surely heard of. Literature recommendations are sometimes also discussed.

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/2446/best-algebraic-geomet... http://mathoverflow.net/questions/3041/the-importance-of-ega...

Amusing fact is it didn't take long at all, compared to some later approaches ;) http://mathoverflow.net/questions/14356/bourbakis-epsilon-ca...

And a twist you might find worthy a mention in your forthcoming essay, http://mathoverflow.net/questions/40920/what-if-current-foun...

I downvoted you without second thought, as I believe people change and holding them accountable for everything they've ever done forever is cruel.

However, now that I recall this lionhearted guy better, I think he should be held to his own standards.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366721

I spent half an hour composing meaningful description of insignificance of the work (without judging if it is indeed a result, attacked "uniqueness" is more of a technicality than anything much of a big deal) only to find out author also published stabs at some other Clay problems: http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4935 (PNP), http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.2361 (RH)… at which point I have nothing more to say.

Flagged.

Cool, this.

A very nifty (if somewhat detailed) complexity analysis of the Algorithm X appeared in blogosphere's festschrift for Knuth's 70, http://11011110.livejournal.com/128249.html

I've used P159 in my absolutely first assignment in the intro programming class. I was to make a N-queens solver. The assignment obviously asked for a 8-line backtracking program. But I was naïve. I went to the library and turned it inside out. My solution was ca. 500 lines, and also implemented a way to find the number of solutions without computing them (this was from IIRC a paper by Rivin), and had a randomized mode which would find just a single solution but for fast for very large N (this I found in Norvig's AIMA in a footnote referencing a paper by J.M., I don't remember the page or the full name)). Good times.

$100 in parts, according to this guy: http://vicacopter.com

I tried (unsuccessfully) to make his design a year ago and it was more like $300 though, and that assuming you have the RF equipment.

Guy works at NASA I think. The claim that his is the only fully open source autopilot is to my knowledge true. No docs or schematics though, but these could be adapted from other projects, http://mikrokopter.de http://diydrones.com

I remember that too. It was, as you say, a while ago, meaning long time outdated. And I indeed recall it to be pg-posted, but instead all I can find is this non-pg release with all links broken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045. I looked for in all links to tar and zip archives, could've missed something.

Do you have a reference for that review?

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/1997-November/000128.htm...

at least learn to spell his name!

Thank you for this most kind and substantial observation. In my defense, Hoyle used to joke of himself like that since concieving his steady-state cosmology where matter constantly flowed out of a "hole"; his autobiography "Home is Where Wind Blows" is also a good read.

In my opinion that paper is on the list of the 10 most important discoveries in science

Took cosmology course (with very distinguished cosmologist) and heard of that in passing. Since then forgotten, sorry (It was that important to me, maybe as a footnote to the αβγ mechanism. Of course this says more about my ignorance than importance of Hoyle's legacy).

So then, I view Hoyle as a crank out of my ignorance, you view Penrose as a crank out of your apparent ignorance. Further discussion would not be a rational argument.

Since Dyson contributed half of quantum electrodynamics, and we have numerous Dyson theorems; and since Penrose contributed half of present classical gravity, and we have numerous Penrose theorems, including celebrated Penrose-Hawking incompletness theorem; I think Fred Hole, whose lasting contributions beyond narrating popular books I do not recall, is a fine comparison to Penrose as a pop writer, in addition to mine, perfectly deserved one to scientists of certain calibre who also happen to have some unsubstained and marginalized indiscrete opinions.

not quantum mechanics

Except the twistor formalism he created (following ideas of no one else but Dirac) is important branch of research in quantum mathematical physics and string theory, not only classical gravity.

Just like Hawking or Freeman Dyson had, Penrose too earned his right to odd, and even braggart opinions on everything. Especially since opinions are by definition not meant to advance knowledge, or demonstrate results, but to provoke and inspire discussion.

Thanks :)

I now know the structure, that's why I "grew" to appreciate Gardner nowadays (albeit now I also find he's doing many things "simple as possible and even simpler" (contrary to the Einstein quote) and thus... still unnecessarily convoluted, so I'm not sure if I like him already).

I know your email, but have nothing of value to say ;]

I grew to like Gardner's writings somewhat now. They however, indirectly, had almost devastating effect on my earlier life, promoting sort of mathematics I never could do.

There is "bag of tricks" culture of mathematics (http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf) where one often stands no chance against a "tricky" problem without prior acquaintance with "tricky" sort of shortcut principle. I was always too slow and never grokked or scored this sort of mathematics. I barely found anything profound or beautiful in Gardner's SciAm columns. They were scary like black magic more than they were interesting. My teachers all from this school just bashed me and didn't told me there is richer structured, theoretical and constructive side to mathematics. The same year I qualified to the International Physics Olympiad I got non passing grade in mathematics, at which point I dropped out of HS, went to do what unexpectedly turned out mathematical physics and now I'm for a degree in pure mathematics, several tantalizing years later than if my teachers were not so enchanted by Gardner's tricks.

Most detailed explanation in the blogosphere is "Why Stuff is Hard" by Jim Pivarski,

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/08/why-stuff-is-har...

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/11/why-everything-i...

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/11/why-everything-i...

Complete argument is the Dyson, Lieb and Thirring's proof of stability of matter, http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183555452 .

Sanjeev Arora, paper's coauthor, but also leading expert on approximations to NP-hard problems, has posted a FAQ detailing why he thinks no approximation would help,

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rongge/derivativeFAQ.html

And also his response to RJ Lipton who believes approximation ought to work (but then again Lipton believes P=NP, so for him nothing is impossible):

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/helping-wall-street...

These are mostly practical reservations, carefully stated as to convince of intractability in the real-world case (which they do) but not prove in theory. Excerpt:

   current pricing and rating algorithms use monte carlo methods
   and would not solve densest subgraphs even for moderate parameters.
   So at the very least those should be changed.

   The paper relies upon a stronger form of "P not equals NP", namely,
   that the planted dense subgraph problem does not have an efficient
   algorithm. (In fact it is conjectured that there is no algorithm
   to even compute any approximate solutions to this problem).

If they really do is not proven.

Chroloplast is a chemical device that obeys quantum chemistry and thus is hampered by quantum decoherence. But if how molecules there organize to overcome this is truly and not only seemingly isomorphic to performing quantum computation is unproven yet. In particular Alan Aspuru-Guzik disproved Engel's result from linked article, at the same time discovering possibility of quantum computation of another kind, claim unverified as of yet.

In other news, optimization of solar panel cell geometry was proposed long, long ago as a case of practical utility of quantum information theory.

Detailed discussion of most recent results here: http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=401

Original artwork: http://books.nationalgeographic.com/map/map-day/2008/10/sola...

Someone extracted the image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamcrowe/4002050596/

I wonder what the original credits are though.

Is there a reason why an approximate solution to the dense subgraph problem could not allow

I haven't read the paper either ;] (just skimmed bibliography to get a sense, as I usually do first) but Arora (one of the authors) is an expert on probabilistic approximations, and they do cite 2001 paper by Feige which is standard ref. on approximations to dense subgraph. Also, what they reduce their model to is a "planted" hidden clique variant of dense subgraph, a problem which is hard "on average" and not only in worst case (propety used in crypto protocols also).

More of crazy Whitney code available at http://aplusdev.org

The NT kernel is the most beautiful piece of code I've seen

Modulo Plan9 kernel. It's also lot smaller a read (ca. 50 KLoC and that's it).

NT kernel itself doesn't have source out but for folks who are students

And folks who are hackers should be able to look in certain places to find the leaked version ;>

According to James Simons, "The average annual income of leading research mathematicians (those, say, with at least three articles in the Annals of Mathematics) is about 10,000,000 USD" ;]

"widely held view"

;)

No. But it makes it "shared by many", your original quantification.

You see, you're misreading for the numerous time. First you didn't care to read what OP linked and went into generalisations having nothing to do with the case. [[BTW I just don't know what you're arguing with me about since it's the same thing you observed in that comment. I just feel like being trolled, I agree with your comment I'm responding to now and I agree with the comment #837189, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837189 ]] Then you didn't read mine, or decided to start petty argument supposing it's isolated incident of just Gasarch not knowing a thing about logic and verification scene where there was a common agreement in the thread that fields became separated to a point of sillness. Now your changing from ontological view to my position that communities define fields by what they call themselves (TCS is what SPJ does). Never mind changing quantifiers suggesting that I want to argue about who has holy right and the majority. It was just a point it's not isolated view. Of course america is isolated, in a sense, by the sea. If SPJ defines TCS then he still has nothing to do with whole TCS community. Because TCS forms no consistent community besides having to do with computers.

I'm prone to trolling.

No, superior way would be to refrain from talking with people at all when I clearly see I'm not up to challenge. Especially to refrain from meta discussions.

As Richard Hamming said, one may either just do research accepting things as they are, or changing people's minds, but not both.

By the way, last time I checked there was no satisfactory definition of "computer" amongst various theoretical computer sciences. Thank god it's not my problem.

impossible to exclude SPJ from any sensible definition of "theoretical computer science"

Yes, there is. Vide my last sentence above.

Proving that is futile because you want to argue anywas and as I said I'm not that eloquent.

Nobody takes away from SPJ of what he is.

Edit: you expanded your argument after I wrote above. I don't feel like I have anything useful to say. Not that I felt that in the first place, I just gave a counterexaple showing of how world stands. Next time I'll run into someone I'll first ask what school he attends and who is his advisor instead of arguing about what he semantically meant describing his field. Then it would be evident what he works in and if we have anything to learn from eachother insetad of wasting our both time for idle argument.

What one community decides to define itself as isn't really a concern of mine.

Ehh, then I won't be able to convince you that it's not true that what you called crazy view on TCS is in fact common view. Not that I was able to do that anyways; I'm not that eloquent.

Amichail said SPJ is not member of that community and that's perfectly true. You opted to that on ontological grounds. Fine. I've shown that leaders of CS theory in US doesn't give a flip about that ontology and just mind their own business. TCS community is fragmented in two disjoint ways.

Why T in TCS then at all? Maybe because most of people are not linguists and doesn't care. Mathematicians for example doesn't care at all about naming. Most common path of least action is just call the thing by the surname of whomever was loudest shouting about it. They rightly assume it's just irrelevant anyways even if troublesome at times. By the Arnol'd principle name almost never reflects of who actually made the discovery anyways and the rest of msthematics' ontology and semantics is horrendous, http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/unfortunate-math.... I can perfectly imagine category theory being more relevant to programming than resolving PvsNP. Conversely TCS is about computation and computability and rest are further abstractions, so this can be argued any way one wants.

Sorry for not responding for a long time. I didn't mean to be snarky above, sorry about that too.

I wrote a bit more here, but wasn't satisfied with how it went so its no more. It was anyways mainly about Sturmfels' programme of reasoning about graphical models with algebraic geometry and how I see it and less TO the paper, so it was probably unsubstantial not only badly written.

By this time I'm sure you already know what program of algebraic statistics is anyways and surely can judge it for yourself. This paper fits it and is not directly consumable by machine learning just yet. Other parts of AS are. To actually use either parts the book I mentioned is minimum anyways and will clarify alot. Even if summary of the paper or AS itself is to be presented to a prof, there is no way around this book. The shortest intro to AG is by M. Reid, it freely builds on commutative algebra (short intro on J.S. Milne page at jmilne.org) that builds on abstract algebra. I haven't read the new book by Sturmfels and Sullivant but I'm half-sure it just assumes AG nor doesn't explain statistics.