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 Get back to work! (07 Dec 2005 at 16:45)
I am a bit more relaxed because the network is back and my thesis proposal is dried out, and I gave the introduction to my advisors (who have had really high standards as respects writing recently) who actually said that it was good. I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but a bit less despair.

Here is my Christmas list:
  • Ice crampon attachments for running shoes
  • Snowshoe attachments for running shoes
  • Crossing guard outfit with hand-held STOP sign
  • Matter transporter beam
  • Spicy hommus
  • Constructive proof of P=NP
  • Martin Marquis 80/20 bronze medium gauge acoustic strings
  • a piano
  • Books that are very short or mostly pictures, or pictures of books
  • Time stopper beam
  • One of those portable roll-up FIDE chess sets with a chess clock with flags that fall pathetically when time runs out
  • and the chess set should have fairy pieces like a cardinal and rose and grasshopper
  • a banjo or any other instrument that is like a drum with strings
  • Canon BP-511 or equivalent battery
  • a sled that can have rockets attached to it
  • somebody should rewrite LaTeX and do it right
  • an ultrasonic humidifier
  • a crucible
  • blowtorching goggles but I don't want to look like a weird cartoon character with plastic skin
As always I gleefully accept non-functioning replicas or drawings of these objects, if made lovingly by hand.
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t		 Anonymous (pool-70-20-127-7.pitt.east.verizon.net) – 12.07.05 21:16:28
http://pics.livejournal.com/lincoln3/pic/00001h5h/s640x480
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t		 Tom 7 (h-72-244-69-245.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 12.07.05 22:03:33
LOLOL adam! Well, at least my skin doesn't really look plastic...
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t		 FARINA00 (host226-98.pool8536.interbusiness.it) – 12.08.05 13:46:17
>Constructive proof of P=NP

PROLOG is what you want
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t		 Tom 7 (gs82.sp.cs.cmu.edu) – 12.08.05 16:13:49
I don't think so, Farina... ;)
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t		 FARINA00 (host226-98.pool8536.interbusiness.it) – 12.09.05 15:59:56
heh, you know - I still believe that "logic languages" coupled with horrible amounts of memory and computing power, are the way to solve riddles like P vs NP...
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t		 Tom 7 (gs82.sp.cs.cmu.edu) – 12.09.05 16:20:54
Oh.. well, yeah, I agree with that kind of thing. I mean, we use Twelf (which is like a higher-order, typed prolog... much better) all the time to prove theorems here, and automated theorem proving can often discover proofs that are too tedious for people to find. But I think we need a lot more power before we'll be able to tackle P=?=NP ! (If only we had some kind of process that allowed us to solve hard problems like theorem proving in polynomial time......)
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t		 FARINA00 (host226-98.pool8536.interbusiness.it) – 12.10.05 07:23:23
Automated theorem proving is one of the things which most fascinates me. I remember that I wasted months on a program to randomly construct algorithms which were supposed to produce prime numbers only. The algorithmic constructor took various historical prime generation algorithms, split them in tokens and recombined them randomly spicing them a bit here and there. So ingenuous, so entertaining!
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t		 Tom 7 (h-72-244-69-245.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 12.10.05 10:46:47
Genetic algorithms!

Well, rest assured that typical ATP is a bit more directed than that... ;)
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t		 Arthur (ctwboo101.ctw.utwente.nl) – 12.12.05 03:26:16
Hmm. Threw my banjo away a few years ago, as it was unplayable.
Also, I took it apart by then and didn't know how to put it back together again.
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t		 Tom 7 (h-72-244-70-57.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 12.31.05 20:18:50
Maybe it was unplayable because you took it apart?
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