I was really excited over the weekend, because I thought that I had found a beautifully elegant solution to the current stumbling block in my research with Antti and Henri.  Last night I excitedly write up the idea and sent it off.  Today was a busy one:  some administration (as always), nice chat with my boss, pleasant meeting with student who for once showed me a wonderful piece of work.  (I should have been much more enthusiastic about it.  I realize now that students – like dogs – need some positive reinforcement to encourage desireable behaciours.)

Unfortunately in the back of my mind a nasty suspicion was bubbling up:  my elegant solution is wrong.  Needless to say, …  Well, I’ll say it:  I am a little disappointed.  But the idea is so nice that I still hope to rescue it.  Perhaps a few optimizations can avoid the exponential behaviour.  I try to be as discrete as possible when I talk about my work, but it is not giving away too much to explain that the idea is based on a graph exploration.  Originally I had hoped to visit each state a small number of times, but now I realize that we have to visit each path a small number of times.  Sigh.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day.