
How to Elect a Leader Faster Than a Tournament (2014) - jbapple
http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1001
======
z3t4
Why do scientific "papers" insist of using PDF when HTML would be a much
better choice as it supports linking to references, dynamic media (better
graphs), meta keywords and search indexing!?

~~~
jamessb
> Why do scientific "papers" insist of using PDF when HTML would be a much
> better choice

Almost all journals do offer both HTML and PDF versions of their articles. The
main advantage of PDF is that it appears exactly the same as the printed
article in a journal, and is easy to print.

A PDF also combines the whole article into a single file that can be easily
imported into reference management software.

> as it supports linking to references

So does PDF (easily generated in LaTeX using the hyperref package), though a
given PDF file may or may not actually include links. For example, the ACS
journals offer a 'PDF' and 'PDF w/ Links' download for every article.

> dynamic media (better graphs)

This is a fair point, but enhanced/interactive figures could be on a separate
figures-only web page.

> meta keywords

PDF does support metadata, including Author, Title and Keywords. In LaTeX this
can set using pdfinfo: [http://www.howtotex.com/tips-tricks/adding-pdf-
metadata-in-l...](http://www.howtotex.com/tips-tricks/adding-pdf-metadata-in-
latex/)

> search indexing

I'm not sure what you mean. The PDF of any paper will contain serchable text
(except for old papers produced by scanning archived copies).

------
titanomachy
How can an algorithm which sends _O(n^2)_ messages between _n_ nodes have
_O(log-star(n))_ time complexity? I'm reading the paper now to try and
understand, but it doesn't seem possible to me. Doesn't _O(n^2)_ messages mean
each node send on average _O(n)_ messages? Perhaps some subtlety of asymptotic
notation escapes me here.

For those (like me) who didn't know, log-star is the iterated log function and
grows _very_ slowly: IteratedLog[2^65536] == 5.

~~~
titanomachy
The answer, of course, is in the paper: "time complexity" here doesn't have
its usual meaning, but is defined as "the number of times a processor relies
on the adversary to schedule a computation step or to deliver messages". The
paper implies that this is the usual definition used in distributed systems
analysis.

