
Complexity Theory: A Modern Approach - Rod
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/theory/complexity/
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barbie17
I would argue that for most entrepreneurs studying machine learning has
greater marginal utility than studying complexity theory, but to each his/her
own I guess.

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YuriNiyazov
Depends what your niche is. Do you manage a petabyte cluster? All of a sudden,
everything that used to be "complexity theory" becomes "complexity practice".

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barbie17
No, I don't think we are talking about the same kind of complexity here.
Complexity Theory is exactly the opposite of real world pragmatism. It is
about the asymptotic behaviors of algorithms and the resources need to solve
certain class of problems such as Traveling Salesman or Min-Set-Cover.

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YuriNiyazov
Actually, that is exactly what I am talking about. The implication was that
problems like that do show up in "real-life" coding, and while brute-force
solutions for those problems work for very small n, you need to recognize the
fact that those problems do not have reasonable solutions in general, and you
should know how to approximate the solutions (in the technical sense of
"approximation"), and furthermore know enough complexity theory to know the
situations where even an approximation will not have a reasonable solution.

For example, I believe that the problem of creating optimal schedules for high
school students is NP-Complete (optimal in the sense that it will satisfy all
of the students' preferences for electives, and all of the teachers'
preferences for the classes they want to teach).

Yes, I admit that the example will never involve petabytes of data. That
doesn't invalidate my original point though.

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YuriNiyazov
Just as I am reviewing Sipser, this shows up. On that note - is anyone on HN
interested in creating a CS theory online study group? You see, I've had an
interest in the "important, hard problems" of our field for a very long time
now: both the "is P == NP ?" and "How do you make something people want?", but
in this post I'd like to address the first one. I used to toy with the idea of
going to grad school, becoming a hermit, and just studying complexity theory
for the next 10 years, but since then I've become somewhat disenchanted with
the allure of grad school. However, I still want to know what is wrong with
all the purported proofs listed here:

<http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm>

What do you guys think?

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dantheman
I'm not a member of this group, but it might be up your alley;
<http://people.csail.mit.edu/bjuba/crypto-complexity/>

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simplegeek
No TOC ;(

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simplegeek
Here we go, <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/theory/index.php/Compbook/Draft>

