TITLE: Finding Cool Ideas to Play With
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 09, 2024  3:45 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
 In
 <a href="https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2024/01/a-nice-dice-problem-part-2.html">
    a recent post on Computational Complexity</a>,
 Bill Gasarch wrote up the solution to a fun little dice problem he
 had posed previously.  Check it out.  After showing the solution,
 he answered some meta-questions.  I liked this one:

<blockquote><em>
 How did I find this question, and its answer, <b>at random</b>?
 I intentionally went to the math library, turned my cell phone
 off, and browsed some back issues of the journal <b>Discrete
 Mathematics</b>.  I would read the table of contents and decide
 what article sounded interesting, read enough to see if I
 really wanted to read that article.  I then SAT DOWN AND READ
 THE ARTICLES, taking some notes on them. 
</em></blockquote>

 He points out that turning off his cell phone isn't the secret to
 his method.

<blockquote><em>
 It's allowing yourself the freedom to NOT work on a a paper for the
 next ... conference and just read math for FUN without thinking in
 terms of writing a paper.
</em></blockquote>

 Slack of this sort used to be one of the great attractions of the
 academic life.  I'm not sure it is as much a part of the deal as
 it once was.  The pace of the university seems faster these days.
 Many of the younger faculty I follow out in the world seem always
 to be hustling for the next conference acceptance or grant proposal.
 They seem truly joyous when an afternoon turns into a serendipitous
 session of debugging or reading.

 Gasarch's advice is wise, if you can follow it:  Set aside time to
 explore, and then do it.

 It's not always <b>easy</b> fun; reading some articles is work.
 But that's the kind of fun many of us signed up for when we went
 into academia.

 ~~~~~

 I haven't made enough time to explore recently, but I did get to
 re-read an old paper unexpectedly.  A student came to me to discuss
 possible undergrad research projects.  He had recently been noodling
 around, implementing his own neural network simulator.  I've never
 been much of a neural net person, but that reminded of
 <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2464576.2482742">
    this paper</a>
 on PushForth, a concatenative language in the spirit of Forth and
 Joy designed as part of an evolutionary programming project.
 Genetic programming has always interested me, and concatenative
 languages seem like a perfect fit...

 I found the paper in a research folder and made time to re-read it
 for fun.  This is not the kind of fun Gasarch is talking about, as
 it had potential use for a project, but I enjoyed digging into the
 topic again nonetheless.

 The student looked at the paper and liked the idea, too, so we
 embarked on a little project -- not quite serendipity, but a project
 I hadn't planned to work on at the turn of the new year.  I'll take
 it!
-----