Pittsburgh Perl Workshop practice talk

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop's coming up in just about 2 1/2 weeks on
September 23.  They recently posted their schedule at
http://www.pghpw.org/schedule.html.  You might notice that they've
scheduled me talk in between Andy Lester and the afternoon break, so I
definitely need to do a practice talk ahead of time.  How does Monday,
September 18 sound for a tech meeting?

The title of my talk is "Approximation Algorithms in Perl".  They
don't have links to the talk abstracts up yet, so here's what I sent
them:

  OVERVIEW

  This talk will show easy and clever ways to code approximate
  solutions to NP-complete problems.

  KNOWLEDGE LEVEL

  The Perl I'll show in this talk will be fairly straightforward and
  should be easily understandable by programmers at most skill levels.
  However, I might touch on a little math and computer science topics,
  in particular big-O notation and NP-completeness.

  DETAILED ABSTRACT

  Your boss has given you a new assignment.  Remembering back to that
  intro to programming course you took when you were in college, you
  realize that the problem he's asked you to solve is NP-complete.
  People smarter that you have been working on this since before you
  were born and haven't been able to come with any good solutions, so
  chances are you won't, either.  So what do you do?  It turns out
  that many NP-complete problems have approximate solutions that are
  surprisingly close to optimal.  Even better, many of them are really
  easy to code.  This talk begins with a brief introduction to NP-
  completeness, then shows several simple approximate solutions to
  famous NP-complete problems.

Basically I'm going to be summarizing a 10 week long course I took at
Drexel last spring into half an hour. :)

Walt

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