Fun
I actually went into school yesterday, which was very unusual -- I hardly ever go in on the weekends. But I needed to do a lot of reading and finish up a machine learning theory homework, and there was no way I was going to get work done at home with the olympics on. I ended up spending most of the day in the lounge, reading papers on various topics in approximation algorithms to try to figure out what topic I want to present in class. There was one particularly cool paper on online network design problems that finds a good fractional solution online, and then does randomized rounding online, which is a very cool approach. It's good stuff. In research news, we actually used in inverse Ackermann function for something other than set-union, and using it actually led to result involving log^*, which is another strange function that you don't see much. It's really cool how these seemingly weird and random functions come up somewhat naturally.
Yesterday night there was a GSA happy hour at the Phipps Conservatory, which was a pretty cool venue. It was much more high class than any other GSA event I've been to, but in the end it was basically like all the others -- tons of grad students hanging out and drinking. But it was cool being around all the plants, and it was fun hanging out with people that I don't see that often like Nils and Ben. Afterwards a bunch of us went out to Silky's in Squirrel Hill, which was a lot of fun. They have a mini-shuffleboard game, only the second one that I've ever seen (the first is actually at CMU). Serge and I got dominated by Dan and someone random from the bar. It was a good night.
Yesterday night there was a GSA happy hour at the Phipps Conservatory, which was a pretty cool venue. It was much more high class than any other GSA event I've been to, but in the end it was basically like all the others -- tons of grad students hanging out and drinking. But it was cool being around all the plants, and it was fun hanging out with people that I don't see that often like Nils and Ben. Afterwards a bunch of us went out to Silky's in Squirrel Hill, which was a lot of fun. They have a mini-shuffleboard game, only the second one that I've ever seen (the first is actually at CMU). Serge and I got dominated by Dan and someone random from the bar. It was a good night.