Jukka Suomela

@Opt Please post as an answer!

(continued) I think Dijkstra in the general case is something that is rather ill-suited for any kind of a local heuristic rule, and this is one of the challenges that we will have if we try to solve it with machine learning techniques.

@domotorp I guess one part of the answer is that playing chess might be comparable to developing a local heuristic rule for finding approximately shortest paths in some specific real-world setting. (Think of something like "you are somewhere in an unknown city and you would like to find a supermarket", and then try to program a robot to solve this based on what its camera sees.) Here the neural net could learn to evaluate the "quality" of each position reachable from the current position, and then the final algorithm would just go in the direction that the neural net thinks promising.

@usul But there are many settings in which it is sufficient to solve a finite problem, and a solution to the finite problem implies a uniform algorithm; this way one can use computers to synthesise uniform algorithms. Often this is done nowadays with e.g. SAT solvers, but maybe one could replace here Boolean formulas and SAT solvers with e.g. neural networks and backpropagation?

"…clearly shows that there is no such minimum energy limit and that a logically irreversible gate can be operated with an arbitrarily small energy expenditure…" phys.org/news/2016-07-refutes-famous-physical.html

Please give a formally precise mathematical definition. Introduce some notation, e.g., $x_{t,i} \in \{0,1,2\}$ is the state of cell $i \in \mathbb{Z}$ after time step $t = 0,1,2,\dotsc$. Now you say that the CA halts at time $t$ for input $x_0$ if ...? Do you require that e.g. $x_{t,i} = 0$ for all $i$? Or something else?

It just occurred to me that if we could give a talk (e.g., @ FCRC) on a result that was co-authored by cstheory.se, it would be a nifty way to promote us...

I just thought that it might be a nifty way to promote us.

Could it work? Would anyone want to see anything like that? Abuse of the platform?

Would it make any sense to have something like "mini-polymath questions"? Questions that would aim at solving an open research problem and which would lead to a published paper?

Anyone going to advertise us @ FCRC 2011?

FCRC?

To get any researchers in that area...

@Sadeq: Which certainly is research-level, but it is also a bit like "could you do my work for me".

@Sadeq: "I need to have some HW problems for my students for my course on XYZ, could you suggest something?"

By the way, should we encourage or discourage questions that ask for HW problems (not HW solutions)?

@Sadeq: Mods can do something. We can always leave the SE platform and set up our own Q&A site. And then I would really like to know if our moderators would support the transition to a new platform or be against it. :)

So on who's side are you?-)

I mean, not everyone has been too happy with the oddities of the voting platform, for example. And the way SE people have reacted.

But I have a somewhat politically-incorrect question: recently there has been a lot of unhappiness @ meta.cstheory regarding the stackoverflow.com maintainers/admins. What's your take on this? Are you loyal to SE?-)

I mean, surprisingly happy if we keep in mind that we are on Internet...

I think in general, people have been very happy @ meta.cstheory.

So all candidates think that this is ok, this is the way that things should be, and the difference between us and tex/photo is just that we are comparing apples and oranges?

The numbers are funny. We have got > 100 unanswered questions. For example, tex.se and photo.se have exactly 0 unanswered questions.

Should we be worried about this situation? Happy about this?

Cf. tex.stackexchange.com/unanswered and photo.stackexchange.com/unanswered

Here is one question: cstheory.stackexchange.com/unanswered

Just lurking...