1. I have been working hard on the FAST system and I am finally finishing up an important part (handling DiVinE models).  I hope to finish testing on Friday and then to write a full model checker (or three) on Saturday and Sunday.  This is an optimistic plan, but one I hope I can execute.  It means that I might start breaking new ground next week and have some new results by the end of March.  Unfortunately my plan to share this project with my Finnish collaborators has hit an obstacle: our IT department seems unwilling to open up our server to the outside world and I’m still negotiating a settlement.
2. I have had a long long weekend in Vleesbaai and Kleinmond, both very rewarding.  I have some photo’s from Vleesbaai that I shall try to process and post tomorrow.
3. I have not had a run since last Thursdays, but I plan on two tomorrow.

I am exhausted after the Bridging Course. The last three days of last week and yesterday and today I devoted to the course. Today and yesterday I did not have a single hour to spare: last night I was setting up an online feedback system for the students to complete this afternoon, and tonight I coded up the analysis part. I hetitate to publish the link, but in general the students like the course a lot. The bad point seems to be the lack of air conditioning. Best points — for my own teaching — were the funny videos shown every 20 minutes and the liberal distribution of chocolates in exchange for class participation.

Tomorrow I have some admin and I estimate that I cannot escape the rest of January without more of this kind of slog. But then opens up the vista of five and a half months of pure research, including 8 or 9 nine weeks in Finland and 6 or 7 weeks in the USA. Hmm…I’d better start sorting out the details.

I have already told a colleague that I shall not be teaching the course again next year. But this is not because I do not want to: I quite enjoy it. However, I make a tidy sum from the course and I think it is only fair that we rotate it among the staff. Truthfully, it is hard work and I won’t do it for nothing, but I hope to stay involved.

I have to think of something to tell the students tomorrow. I’m not sure whether the weekend gave them new hope or completely shattered their egos. The previous practical session on Friday was hard. I could tell that the students were tired. They had, as I said then, reached that limit where understanding breaks down. Too many new ideas. Tomorrow they need a pep talk. I want to buoy them up and convince them that it might seem strange now, but that they will get used to the work. The important thing is to carry on. Many new concepts seem strange at first, but after a little exposure one internalizes them and they come to be familiar and ordinary.

Yesterday and today I was working on a cute little programming problem which I’ll explain tomorrow.

The lecture went fairly well, except that there were a few more puzzled looks, perhaps. Maybe a few answers that were a little more wide of the mark than before. But the rot had begun. At the core, in the deepest innards of the beast, a festering sore was ready to burst upon an unsuspecting world. In this afternoon’s practical session the students’ lack of knowledge reached levels that the world has never seen before.

The first hour was distressing, but I think I have now come to terms with what has happened. We crossed that magical barrier between just enough confusion (to be excited by the new work) and just too much confusion (to become totally lost and almost incoherent). Students that answered intelligently yesterday, today spouted complete nonsense.

Of course I don’t blame them. Or myself. One can only absorb new work at a certain rate and too much novelty can scramble your brains. Your mind needs time to adjust and process the new concepts. I hope the weekend will be enough for the students.

After all, they started Wednesday morning with zero knowledge and today were writing nested for-loops. I think that is impressive, given that we try to make them really understand the work. Any monkey can bandy about for-loop until something sticks.

Today things went a little differently. We talked about selection (if statements) in class, and that went fine. But come the practical, everyone struggled and few students completed all three exercises. To be honest I do not think it was the if statements per se that floored them so completely. Rather, the exercises involved a lot of “Computer Science” thinking of breaking a large, daunting problem down into smaller steps, and doing that over and over until you reach the point where you can write down the code. I don’t mind at all that they struggled: it is the only way to learn. But tomorrow we’ll have to do a serious post-match analysis to make sure that they understand why they struggled and why it is not the end of the world.

Like many other skills, learning to program the very first time is an emotional experience. It is easy for veterans to look at a problem and to see the solution, and to be unable to conceive how anyone could possibly find it difficult. Remember, these students are learning basic programming. The trick, of course, is to give them the right kind of guidance. Often I find myself not telling the student anything factual whatsoever; instead, it is merely encouragement to not give up, consider the problem again, what is the important part, can you think of a way we could do that, that seems fine and what’s next, etc. When I do give advice (and I hope this is true for all or our teaching assistants), it is important not to give the answer, but rather ask the pertinent questions that will make the students realize exactly what they are doing, or exactly how to overcome the next obstacle.

There is no air conditioning in the lecture halls  we are using, and today was 33+ degrees outside. So not the greatest comfort. At least there was air conditioning in the computer labs, but I was on my feet all three hours. I should be exhausted, and I am, but it is the good kind of exhaustion. Tonight I can sleep soundly.

My decision to buy a sixpack is probably influenced by the heat and some marteting seed planted somewhere that a cold beer on a hot day is pleasurable. My low alcohol consumption means that the one bottle I had this afternoon produced a very light buzz, but nothing to get excited about. I’m definitely not going to get wasted, although I have a policy that it is a good idea to do that once a year. But I think that, as in the case of smoking, the effect is mostly psychological.

The heat means that I did not accomplish much today, although I have proofread another big chunk of a thesis I am examinating. I want to finish that tonight, so that is another reason to not plunk down and have another beer. I’ll save the beverages for another day. Also had a nice lunch with Willem and Amanda, and we had a good conversation about his Web-based Applications course. My contribution was limited to suggesting heavily that the students our VirtualBox, of which I am semi-enamoured. It makes life a lot easier for experimental work, and on the Mac it works perfectly. Come to think of it, I had better to do some work on the CS website in VB tonight.

Unfortunately, not many numbers are of this form: needs to be pretty close to and the two factors must obviously straddle it.  I thought for a while that even if or a short search might reveal the factors, as long as , but this still only covers a small range of numbers.

Then I thought I would try something else: starting with as above one could test all the numbers as factors (which can be done in time, where is the number of potential factors).  If none of them are factors, then assign and retry.  Unfortunately, to stay in polynomial time, one can only try numbers.  And most numbers are not amenable to this scheme.  Sigh.

If I try to think back to my own second year, which is now 20 years ago, I think I can recall quite a lot of what happened in the course, but it is difficult to tell how much I really understood. I distinctly recall some details, such as the inner workings of heap sort. But the details of other algorithms, which I remember being taught, are hazy. Most of all, I remember that we were taught induction (we used Udi Manber’s Introduction to Algorithms), so we were taught how to think, not what to think. At some point I will lobby to take over the “Advanced Algorithms” course, which is currently taught be the same person who teaches the undergraduate algorithms course. This is not an ideal situation and it would be good to have the students enjoy more than one perspective.

This time of year is makes more sense to look to the future than the past. Truthfully, I cannot even imagine what is going to happen to myself and my career. I would love to move back to Europe, but that is definitely not going to happen in 2011. And as my age is creeping up and up, I suspect that my best strategy is to establish myself as a solid researcher here, before being able to go anywhere else. Or is that just my own ageist pessimism?

But what will happen in Computer Science? IBM has announced their list of “5 in 5″: five predictions for the next five years. I wonder if I can make a list of “1 in 1″? What will be the most important development in 2011? I don’t think it will be . I don’t think it will be factorization either. Perhaps the big IP6 switch-over might be a big story, but that has little to do with cutting-edge Computer Science. Lots of advances in Computer Graphics, driven by movies. There will inevitably be new iPhones and iPads and derivatives. The best prediction I can make is that there will be continuing advances in the field of cloud/grid computing, multicore systems, and the immersive internet. The first two fields will be mostly invisible to most people, but the last could be part of “immersive social networks”.

Today was somewhat wasted because I did not get a good night’s sleep last night. And so I spent most of the afternoon napping.  The morning was slightly more productive, but my plan is to make an early night of it tonight and start early tomorrow. I am slightly concerned that my zeal has led me to a state where I work for hours and hours at low productivity and feel tired a lot of the time. Instead, I aim to work shorter, more intense hours.

Trying to lay down some set of “rules” is in vain, and my only hope — I think — is to make small incremental adjustments, like a space ship, and to keep some sort of goal in mind.