Thursday, May 22, 2008

Bicycle and Theory Visions

Blogging is not like riding a bicycle, because you do forget and lose the rhythm if you don't blog for a while, or so I realized. Let me get back on with a comment on the Visions for TCS workshop.

Meetings like this get a lot of smart researchers together: they agonize, organize their thoughts and generate a thoughtful writeup which is typically a summary of the recent past with a slight peek at the future. Such meetings are much-needed, and one is grateful that top researchers care and free up time to do this. This exercise, prescient or not, gives us a top down sense of orderly progression of research.

In the other model (the Levin model?), my preferred model, research springs up in a distributed way, bottom up, and while our visions point one way, these nuggets sprout, break the ground into lumps, spread like weed in entirely different ways, and ultimately make it to the writeup above in their middle age!

Top down or bottom up? It reminds me of an Yiddish story of Seychel and Mazel competing to see who is more important in life. If you have one, you want the other. It is like business consultants: if you have a centralized company, they ask you to distribute it to be more flexible; if you have a distributed company, they ask you to centralize it for efficiency.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Have you watched either of the TV series Bones or House? You should :) The statements you make are often deep as in them.

7:33 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just got online and read about these shows, and makes me feel like I should get a TV just to see these shows! :) Thank you!

-metoo

7:30 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

In today's age of the internet, you can find some free+legal episodes on the the channel websites, and all free+illegal copies of episodes.
Else, blockbuster is a good source. The main stories/mystery itself is fun, but the background conversation, story line and simple statements that make you think are amazing.

5:59 PM  

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