Run a tournament that does a series of comparisons to decide a winner. No matter what algorithm you use, there will always be that final comparison, before...
I had planned on a post today on "What is Perfection?" but since the answer is not "The Patriots", I will wait for a more appropriate time. The list of...
This is a joint post by Lance AND Bill in response to this post on the Sfaka blog claiming "false and misleading information" on our blog (scroll down). We...
Guest Post by Rance Cleavland, professor at University of Maryland at College Park, who works in Model Checking. Earlier this week, the ACM announced the...
On Tuesday IMDB ran a poll on "Who is your favorite movie mathematician?" Let's consider the nominees, all white, male and American. Dustin Hoffman has two...
There is a book The Liar's Paradox and The Towers of Hanoi: The Ten greatest Math Puzzles of all Time Thats just two problems; however, the book does have 8...
Neither of the Democratic candidates have pushed science funding as a major theme in their campaigns, but I pulled out the sections about non-medical funding...
The list of accepted papers for the 2008 IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity has been posted. Since I was on the PC I won't talk about specific papers,...
A young theorist said something like this in a recent talk. Complexity theorists studied worst-case complexity until the mid-80's and then have focused on...
Flashback to 1973: The Miami Dolphins were 16-0 before the superbowl. Yet they were underdogs! As a naive kid I did not understand this. My dad explained to me...
Valiant won the EATCS award. This was already reported on Luca Aceto's blog To goto Valiants website go here To goto the EATCS annoucement of why they are...
The National Academy of Engineering released their Grand Challenges for Engineering on Friday: - Make solar energy economical - Provide energy from fusion -...
(I had a prior post on FUNNY ANSWERS TO MATH OLYMPIAD QUESTIONS: here. This one is a different problem.) In 2000 I made up and graded the following problem...
The shooting at Northern Illinois University hits close to home. NIU is located in DeKalb, about 60 miles west of Chicago and it draws many students from the...
A while back a comment asked Why is Lance Lance and Gasarch Gasarch? It meant why are posts by Lance labelled Posted by Lance where as posts by Gasarch and...
Guest Post by Amir Michail It's hard to understand why people vote. If we put aside social pressure (e.g., what your friends and family think) and sense of...
FOCS call for papers is out: here and here. - The CFP does not have a list of topics. - I have never been able to differentiate FOCS from STOC and most people...
Lance brought up the question of amazon giving bad or odd here. The oddest pointer to an item I might want is as follows. I bought a novelty CD by a group...
I recently got the following spam which I will paraphrase. I hate to me the one to tell you this but everyone is talking about how fat you are. Its disgusting....
The ACM Transactions on Computation Theory, with yours truly as Editor-in-Chief, is now accepting submissions. ACM Transactions on Computation Theory will...
Consider the following game: A player starts with 0 points. For 100 rounds, a player picks one of the following three actions in each round. - Gets 7 points...
Skipping Class Someone on the job market was wondering how many classes they could skip teaching in a typical term. As this is generally not a good question to...
I got this email and was NOT asked to blog about it, but should have been: Visions for Theoretical Computer Science Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) aims to...
If you are a big shot in the political world then endorsing a political candidate has a game theory flavor to it. I'm sure someone could make a formal game...
(A commenter left an off-topic comment on my last entry. INSERT GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN HERE SINCE I DO NOT KNOW GENDER OF COMMENTER raisesd a question of...
I recently watched a surprisingly good documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters where Steve Wiebe tries to break the Donkey Kong record held for...
When discussing what should we teach in a basic complexity course (taken mostly by non-theorists) we often say results such-and-such is important. The question...
Mid-March is the time of year we begin to hear concern from students and postdocs on the job market. The CS job market is a lengthy affair running from January...
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