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VetLegion
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Two questions.
1. Do you sometimes feel a need for intellectual challenge?
2. What is intellectual challenge for you and how/where do you get it?
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Asher
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Calgary, Alberta
Nov 1999
time: 22:21
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1) I usually get enough of that (to the extreme) at work. I sometimes feel the need for an intellectual challenge outside of work, and when that happens I geek out and work on my work-in-progress 3d "engine" that I started a long time ago. A lot of that is very mathy, and a lot of it I was rusty on or never learned in school so I've got to look it up myself.
2) At work it's a huge array of problems that I regularly am tasked to solve. A random example from today is we have a very large oil company that is in the process of "acceptance testing" a cluster of high-performance computers, and is finding the performance is not what they expect. Similarly, a large organization encountered performance issues on a BlueGene machine that indicate a defect of some kind in the compiler (runtime performance is reduced 2.5x compared to gcc, when it should be considerably faster).
In both of these cases, they couldn't let me see the code, or send any sort of test case. In the first case, the company was extremely protective of the code and has a virtually nonresponsive legal department. We couldn't sign an NDA so we could view the code... In the second case, it was a "top secret"/classified program that requires some kind of US national security clearance to see. Obviously, that wasn't an option.
So, I get to figure out the right questions to ask to see how they're using the compiler (which is enormously complicated software), analyze the performance profiling output I had them collect to see what type of functions/operations ate up the most time, etc.
It's really mentally taxing. :/
----
At home I usually don't do anything "intellectually challenging", but I do spend a scary amount of time reading highly technical websites/books about technology so I can learn more about it.
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Flubber
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With a view of the Rockies
Aug 2000
time: 22:21
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I like an intellectual challenge and I get it all the time at work.
My job includes tasks such as :
- make sense of often conflicting regulations
- draft tight and unambiguous contracts related to complex matters-- I think people underestimate the challenge this is when using a language as fraught with ambiguity and nuance as the English language. I enjoy it though
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Sirotnikov
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<--- Yes, It's a "kitty" in a boot.
Feb 2000
time: 07:21
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quote:
Originally posted by MrFun
I was younger then, and he opened my eyes wider than they were before. |
Are you sure it had to do with this thread?  
Yeah, sometimes I feel the need for an intellectual challenge. Even though I frequently get this at work, but only in a very certain field. Many of the topics i'm interested in such as ethics, philosophy, economy and whatever are not challenged there.
I usually try and read Arts and Letters Daily, or talk to my friends, whom I regard as well educated and intellectual. And of course the casual once per 6 month, phone discussion with Az.
Speaking of which, Az - we really should meet up as I'm going away for officer's training in a week.
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Atahualpa
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Hawthrone
Mar 1999
time: 06:21
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quote:
Originally posted by aneeshm
Hmmm . . . .
1) Yes , I do feel the need for intellectual challenge .
2) Computer Science , Physics , and Mathematics . Top three sources of intellectual challenge for me . Currently I'm just a HS student , so I'm not really at the level at which Asher is , but I hope to get there . As a school project I've decided to do something simple - a program to solve those little SUDOKU puzzles you come across in the newspaper . The fact that I've been trying to teach myself the fundamentals of AI from an old book I found in the school library ( it's not really supposed to be there , it's a college-level book ) helps a lot . |
I've recently solved them as well, but I used a different approach. I applied an evolutionary algorithm to see how it worked out and the fact that it was a rather quick hack it worked quite good and always found the solution after several tries.
I didn't think much about operators so I just implemented a simple swap mutation and used an ES. With a GA you might achieve better results, but then you have to think about CrossOvers. I'd like to do a Tabu Search as well, but that required more work and programming the whole thing just took some 8-9 hours (I finished 5am).
As you've probably guessed my field is metaheuristics 
But anyway, the problems can almost be solved straight forward. A friend of mine tried a 2 level recursive approach and so far has solved all of the problems I tried it on.
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30-06-2005 07:17
it is going to power the biggest radiotelescope in the world it covers almost all of the Netherlands and part of germany too....bluegene 27,4 teraflop per second 
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