akrish

Yup it’s almost finals time and you know what that means… productivity is going to plummet and I’m going to start blogging again.Maybe a few of you noticed but my blog has been down for quite some time. I was originally hosting on a free 1-year facebook accelerator from joyent, but the problem was, naturally, that I only get it for a year. Anyway, my contract expired, and I’ve been super busy with school and stuff to re-set my blog on my older hosting service. This last week, I’ve somehow had a bunch of free time (or I’ve been really good at not working on important things) so I decided to set things up again. So yup we’re back. I think I will probably be blogging a lot over the summer (as I did last summer), mostly because I hope to have a bit more free time. I should also start posting lots of pictures.I guess I’ll start things off with an interesting article I found a couple of days ago. These researchers at Yale came up with a new way to analyze the running time of algorithms. The technique is called Smoothed Analysis and the article is here. The actual paper is ridiculously long and I don’t have enough statistics background (or patience) to read the whole thing, but the basic idea was really cool. Also, we just learned about the Simplex method in my algorithms class, and we talked about how in the worst case the algorithm is exponential, but in practice it’s quite efficient. Smoothed analysis is the explanation!