Thursday, July 22, 2010

SODA

Being on the SODA PC is excruciating. Too many submissions are at the level of a hard exercise – things that David Karger would assign in Advanced Algorithms or Randomized Algorithms as homework. And since I'm a problem solver by nature, I cannot resist solving the problems before (in lieu of) reading the papers...


I am left wondering how life on the ICS PC is like. The fact that the PC members can solve the problem in half an hour is promised to not be a negative – so is there any point in engaging the technical side of your brain during the review process?

Which brings me to graph algorithms, a field I have engaged in sporadically. This field strikes me as problem solving par excellence. You think about the problem, you pull a rabbit out of the hat, and run around naked screaming "Εὕρηκα!" Yet most reviewers (which, I will assume, write graph-theory papers in the same way) cannot help commenting on the lack of new techniques in the solution. I interpret this as a code for "We didn't care to think about the problem, we just read over your solution and remarked that it solved the problem by looking at some edges in some order, then at some trees and some vertices."

(I should say I have no sour grapes about this... Graph algorithms in not my main field and all my papers on the topic are in STOC/FOCS. Yet I am amazed by how much the field sabotages itself with this "techniques thing.")

By contrast, I once came across a reviewer that actually wore his problem-solver hat while reading my paper. The review read "I spent days to figure out the interplay and indispensability of the data structures and techniques used. But after fully understanding the entire picture and the interplay of all the data structures, I felt very satisfied. It is indeed a very beautiful piece of algorithmic art. I congratulate the authors for such a novel algorithm." This is possibly the best review I ever got – complemented, of course, by some "no new techniques but important result" reviews.

Which brings me to the main trouble with TCS, in my opinion. If only we could stop inventing a ton of artificial problems every year, and we actually cared about solving some age-old clear-cut problems – then it would be no surprise to find reviewers that have actually thought carefully about your hard problem.