Tuesday, May 29, 2007

PDL C-401

This is the place where the optimization seminar is held every tuesday at UW. Today I had my camera in hand, the reason being the speaker - Dmitri Bertsekas.
The camera also served another purpose: The view of UW and beyond from this place is awesome...

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

A sequencing problem

Found this problem in one of the orkut puzzles community. Though not a real tough problem, I found the solution to be interesting.
The problem is to find the next number in the sequence:

16 , 176 , 552 , 1312 , 2360 , 3504, ?

If you find the solution to the above problem interesting enough, I thought of a similar problem but with added complexity that might be worth trying out..

92, 440, 300, 1309, 728, 1360, ?

Monday, May 21, 2007

Nostalgia

I woke up at 9 pm today (night out the previous day), went through some interesting concepts from the book 'Elementary Probability' by David Stirzaker for about 3 hrs. Remembered that I was hungry and looked out the window to see that it was raining, as it usually does in Seattle. At this moment I was reminded of my life back at IITM where I had done similar crazy things. If this were my hostel room, I just had to cycle another 200 metres to reach gurunath which would have been closing at this moment.
I would have bought the milka cake or a similar cake along with one or two packets of mug noodles (its cold and raining outside, so I figure it would be nice to have something hot).
On the way back, I would have met a friend from Saras proceeding back to his hostel. I start farting with him on some worthless topic and that takes me to his room. I meet two more guys and we start talking about strategies in Quake and AOE and in the next moment we talk about how our 4th year is so different from the other 3 years we have spent in IIT. Muggus during the first two years, many change gears in the 3rd and 4th year, having found a way to beat the system. Now, my friend is in a mood to crash and starts driving junta away from the room.
"Macha, I have to crash da. I have a quiz tomorrow and I don't even know the portion for the quiz. So junta deesh." He says. I look at the time and see that its 4 am now.

I am halfway through my day, another 3 hrs and I would be sleeping comfortably on my bed with the windows wide open and the cool breeze, an after effect of the thunderstorm would linger around in my room. Ah.. that scent. After spending another 2 hrs in my room mugging for the same quiz my friend has no clue about, I decide to take a walk toward the stadium. I have fond memories of the stadium, the place where I spent almost every evening running 10 -15 laps during my 3rd year in the hopes of getting into the inter-iit team. Now, I notice that the day is just breaking out and despite the ground being wet and slushy, the freshness of the mist laden air captures my imagination. I am rooted at the same spot for a few more minutes as I contemplate my existence, my dreams, my victories and my losses. Moments like these make me look at life from an abstract, philosophical angle.
Meanwhile, I realize I am hungry again. I call my friend from Saras. He apparently crashed for 2 hrs and now is mugging for the quiz. We decide to head out to Hot Chips, an eat out just outside IIT. They are just opening up for the day and I order hot idly vada, pongal and filter kaapi. My friend orders masala dosa and coffee.
Nothing like having a full meal before you sleep during the day. We head back to our hostels, my friend to continue his mugging and I to enjoy my sleep for the few hours I can before the quiz.

Snapping back to reality, I realize I have two assigments due tomorrow and I am yet to make progress. Now it's 3 am, and the day has just begun.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

The story of a grad student - 1

"I really am floating in indecision. I like that phrase, I bet no one.....". "Bhaaaaaaskar", called out someone interrupting Bhaskar's thought flow and inducing an irritation in him. He was already pained with the way his life and research was headed and wanted to be left alone. But no.. Vani had spotted him proceeding out of the university and there he was waving to her. He waited as she half-hopped, half-walked the steps of the Information systems building and accosted him with a smile. Ah...that smile, it was a little silly but a really warm one at, that he thought. Bhaskar had known Vani for a few months. There were few Indians at the Texas A and M univesity (TAMU) and Indians generally got more friendly with each other here than back in India. "But what I really like about this is that I can...". "Hi...", you look serious, are you thinking about something?
"Hi..yeah", replied Bhaskar.
"So where are you going?", asked Vani
"I am headed to the ave to have lunch. What about you?"replied Bhaskar
"I am also going out there" said Vani.
Bhaskar thought Vani was acting out a bit strange, atleast a bit strange to him. Bhaskar didn't mind female company but he wasn't looking forward to it in a big way either. He had had a few unsuccessful relationships and that had left him cautious and a tad bit bitter. He wanted things to happen naturally and he definitely didn't want to force relationships. I am not despo, I got plenty of time, he thought.

To be continued....

P.S. I appreciate comments and feedback. So bring them on...

Friday, May 11, 2007

Independent research

It's high time I started looking into this aspect seriously. What really is independent research?
It's simply the maturity to conduct research whose contributions have been assessed to be worthwhile, research which you think is significant enough to warrant publication and research where you have an idea of what the possible data sources are.
This begs the question as to what research is?
Simply stated, research always begins with getting a feel for the chosen field of interest. This is done by reading journal papers and articles in the area of interest. The next step is to identify gaps in the existing literature - either a modeling, methodological or a practical gap or a combinaton of them.
So once you have these gaps, you already have a problem to work on, all you need to do is delineate clearly the objectives of the study and the problem features and you are on a roll.

Now doing research in a new area might require extra reading depending on the methodological quotient of the research area. OR is fairly methodological, transportaion operations is half as much. But then again, there might be a fair amount of data collection issues that need to be dealt in area such as transportation engineering.

All said and done, what one needs is the confidence and the will to do it and that surely will take the person on the path to being an independent and influential researcher.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

The need for formalism in math and its consequences or lack thereof

A very interesting lecture delivered at CMU by Gregory Chaitin, who has taken up research in problems that were ailing Math during the early 20th century - Problems in formalism and foundation of math.

Was the invention of the computer a quirk of fate? Was it due to the failure of a mathematical proposition by Hilbert that mathematics can be formalized completely through an artificial language?

Is there randomness in math as is seen in quantum physics, something pure mathematicians despise? Are there problems that will remain unsolved due to the very reason that there is no structure or pattern that the problems' solution fits into..that the answer to the problem is an accidental truth?

How can the following statement be resolved:
Prove statement 1. And statemet 1 is "This statement is unprovable."
You simply cannot prove statement 1.
If statement 1 is provable, then we have proved something which is unprovable and therefore flawed or absurd. If statement 1 is unprovable, we cannot prove statement 1 and that is what statement 1 says - That it cannot be proved!
A mathemetician cannot stand the absurdity that comes along in proving statement 1. So statement 1 is a kind of an unresolved problem in maths. The only thing that can be done to statements such as statement 1 is to understand why they exist. And why they exist, as argued by Gregory chaitin, is because some statements are accidental truths, the truth doesn't have a formal structure or pattern that it fits into and hence cannot be proved. And why is the truth accidental?
Oh, that's because God plays dice.


The lecture also dwells on - How randomness can be measured in a sequence of numbers and what it has got to do with problem size complexity. Note, problem size complexity is analogous to computational complexity. The former doesn't worry about the efficiency of the algorithm and its computational time and is founded in information theory. The latter is a measure of fast and efficient algorithms.