ANNOUNCE: Tech meeting on Wednesday, September 20

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

Just to make it official, we're having a tech meeting Wednesday night,
September 20, so I can practice my talk for this coming weekend's
workshop.  The meeting will be at 7 PM in our usual spot at ISI.
Thanks to Jim for reserving the room for us.

I copied below what I posted about the talk a few weeks ago.  I'm just
about done with my slides, and this still seems a pretty good
description of the talk.

Walt

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 03:54:35PM -0400, Walt Mankowski wrote:
> 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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