I Nailed My Algorithms Presentation!
Right to the wall.
The past week and a half I’ve been in psycho-work-mode because I had this presentation to do for Advanced Algorithms. For the second half of the course, each class is taught by two student lecturers. Some people worked together, but I chose to work alone (surprise, surprise). So I had to research a topic and present it to the class in an easily digestible format. I also had to come up with homework problems to give the class.
So, it turns out that the topic that I was interested in was rather complicated. And by rather, I mean ridiculously. So I have spent a great deal of time reading the papers, and even more time actually proving all the results in them, so that I made sure that I understood them. This ended up being harder than I had expected, because it turns out that the academic paper’s version of a proof is rather hand-wavy. Much of the time, the authors will just suggest that something is true, give a few steps along the way, and then state the conclusion.
So, anyway, I’ve been working for the last week+ on this, and I finally gave the lecture today. It went so well. I was even under time pressure, because the guy who presented before me ran over. Yet, I think I managed to get the idea across to everyone, even though I had to gloss over some of the more calculation-intensive parts.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in the Harmonic Algorithm for the k-server Problem, you can look at the paper here in .pdf. And, hey, if it’s hard to understand, I have a really informative thirty minute lecture I can give you ^_^
Ian Ferrel 