Potpourri

The task is a difficult one. Like I told you already, I am about to finish my PhD and now I will go to another stage of my life. This is when I need to make serious decisions and take charge of my life, so to say. People seem to perform this task of decision making much in private. But I am going to use this forum effectively to make certain important decisions of my life. It goes without saying, suggestions are most welcome. And more importantly, your views and opinions do carry a lot of weight and I am willing to listen to any suggestions, from anonymous or known readers. Having said this, let me tell you my criteria. cost: about 35,000/- ram: 2 gb hard disk space: about 200gb dvd drive weight: about 2 kg (lesser the better, but budget is also important) support anywhere in India. drivers readily available My queries: Is there any parameter I have forgotten to add? Which company is better? Do you know whether any offers for students are on? Are there any useful links? (other than fir...

Recently, I have created a one hour talk about three puzzles and how they can be solved or understood using some concepts of computer science. The title of the talk reads: Hats off to theoretical computer science. Before starting the talk, I make a point to make the following disclaimer: This is not a theoretical computer science propaganda talk. It is simply aiming to solve/understand solutions of three puzzles. The title is a bit catchy. But the "hats off" part of the title comes simply because all the puzzles are hats puzzles. Here is the talk. (Special thanks to S. P. Suresh for introducing cool fonts.) You may want to download and view it. Try solving the puzzles. Let me know if you find another approach to solve them. The last puzzle alone can be material for a one hour talk. Here is a link available on Google for the last puzzle alone. What is amazing about these slides is, they have solved the last puzzle using Nim games. (google to find out what Nim games are)....

हत्ती गेला अणि शेपूट राहीली. (Translation: The elephant is gone only the tail is left.) Almost five and half years of my Ph.D. are over. Just another few months before I finish. This is now the wrapping up time. Now I am almost done. But for this one last thing. Thesis typing! And believe it or not, this seems to be the hardest part of my Ph.D. years. Mainly because it is boring. But also because it is always at the back of my mind. I wake up and and I am sipping a cup of coffee and there it is, the half finished chapter 3, standing in front of me and asking me why I slept off the previous night when it had been in a middle of a sentence. I am checking my email or writing the blog and it comes and taps on my shoulder and says, "time to get back buddy". It almost yells in my dreams "I need attention!" It's like a person in my life now. And no, I am not a schizophrenic. It is really there everywhere! You won't believe this, but I am literally sneaking out ...

I came across a theory blog started by Lipton. Here is the link to the blog. I found a pointer to one of the articles of this blog through Lance Fortnow's weblog . In the first part of the post, Lipton mentions that the result regarding the closure under complement for space bounded classes was open for a really long time and the fact that people believed that it won't be true was one of the main reasons why it remained open. Lance in his post commented on Lipton's remarks about conventional wisdom regarding NP=P question. But in any case, thanks to this discussion on the weblog, I got to see a nice informal description of Immerman and Szelepcsenyi's result (which is the second part of Lipton's post). The exposition is useful if you have already seen the result and the proof. It is explained assuming many things and hence it may not be a good read for someone reading the result for the first time. I would like to stress the fact that the question was first raised ...