Re: ANNOUNCE: Tech meeting on Wednesday, September 20

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

I almost forgot -- as if the prospect of hearing my talk isn't reason
enough to come to the meeting, I'll also have a few O'Reilly books to
give out!

On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 10:55:46AM -0400, Walt Mankowski wrote:
> 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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