Jokes about algorithms

 I ask students to write me a joke about algorithms pretty regularly. I like seeing what they come up with...

• What did one cross-country star algorithm say to the other?
  "It's run time."
• Teacher: Write me an algorithm that runs in constant time.
  Student: Ok, the first part of my algorithm iterates over a list...
• What's the runtime of log?
  Nothing. Logs can't run.
• When in doubt, O(n!).
• What did the polynomial function say to the exponential function to get it to go away?
  "Beeg-O(n)!" [joke included a visual of an xy graph of poly and exp functions diverging with speech bubbles]
• "Knock knock"
  "Who's there?"
  "The Gale-Shapley Algorithm"
  "That joke wasn't funny"
  "I guess you aren't a good match for my humor!"
• Two engineers are stuck on whether to use BFS or DFS for a problem.
  Eng 1: Should we use BFS instead? Because we tried DFS and we're stuck?
  Eng 2: The real queue is why did I choose this career?
• A 1-day-old great dane talking to a 1-day-old toy poodle
  poodle: I'm bigger than you haha!
  great dane: I"m not worried I am Ω(you)
• Knock knock... Boom bruteforce algorithm
  

Algorithms puns:

• Dancer to Algorithms: "Wow algo! You really have rithm!"
• Why did Lila hate the orchestra concert?
  Because they didn't have any algo-rhythm!
  
• What did Lila play on the drums?
  An algo-rhythm
• What type of music do computer scientists listen to?
  Algo-rhythm-ic Music
• Mr. Merge, Mr. Selection, and Ms. Bubble all joined the Annual Sorting Dance Competition. Can you guess who won?
  Mr. Merge won! How? Because he had the best sorting algo-rhythm :)!
• If my name was algo and I did music they'd call me algo-rhythm!

Regarding graphs:

• What's the bakery's favorite algorithm?
  "Bread"th first search
• BreadFirstSearch, no rice no pasta!
• How do we know that topsort vertices prefer the heat?
  They have to leave once they reach 0 in-degrees.
• What did Dijkstra say to Kruskal?
  Why you so greedy
• What kind of search do you prefer?
  DFS, I like my algorithms with a little more depth to them. * badum tzzzz *
• What did BFS say to DFS? Nothing. Algorithms can't talk.
• Why did the edge cross the cut?
  Since it had to provide the shortest path :(

This post's theme word is capacitate (v tr), "to make capable." Studying computer science does not capacitate one for comedy.

Final exam

The exam was printed in color. Partly this was to make the diagrams pretty, partly this was as a hint that students should be thinking about colors. Adjacent to some colored text, a student wrote "LOVED THIS HINT, THANK YOU!" which is a very positive piece of exam-writing feedback to me. In a proof for this problem, another student wrote "The hint of coloring the 4 houses the different colors further solidifies [claim they were making]."

Down the margins of the final, one student entered a philosophical reverie: "What is 'correct'? Can approx algs ever even get there"

When asked to give an example, one student wrote "I can't fight the urge to say ∅". This was, in fact, a correct example.

I offered students the opportunity to write a joke. I am not sure these all make sense?

• Solving NP-complete algorithms is like finding a CS prof that doesn't wear khakis. Theoretically possible, but in practice it's too hard.
• The biggest dream for an NPC is to become P(layable).
• Why did the NP-complete problem become a therapist?
  It thought it had a lot of experience with unsolvable isues.
• "That's NPC behavior."
  Normal person interpretation: someone is acting funky like a Non-Player Character.
  Theoretical Computer Scientist interpretation: How did they figure out how to live non-deterministically?
• Why buy cereal from the NP-hard aisle of NP store?
  It's part of an NP-complete breakfast.
• I went to the doctor for my (N)ose (P)ain Problem. He took way too long to find a solution.
• This joke is NP-complete, reducible to everyone else's, hard to understand, and has a polytime verifier. Verifier: print("HAHAHAHAHAHA")
• Why did NP not cross the road?
  Because it wasn't efficient to do so.
• What did NP-complete say to NP-hard?
  Don't worry, your polynomial time is coming!
• What did Vertex Cover say to Independent Set?
  You NP-complete me <3
• Why did the NP-complete problem go to the party?
  It thought it would be a clique-free environment.
• Once NP-complete is verified on tiktok, it has its own verifier.
• A: Did you hear Neal Patrick Harris found his long lost brother, of the same name, Neil Patrick Harris?
  B: Oh wow, how nice!
  A: I know, right! They said now that they found each other, they both feel Neil Patrick-complete!
• Why was Lila late for the CS41 final (theoretically)?
  Because she was stuck in traffic and navigating it was NP-complete!
• Teacher: Prove this problem is NP-complete.
  Student: I just "completed" a solution, so it must be NP-complete.
• Q: What do you call a math-inspired, environmentally-minded tap-dancing group?"
  A: "Al Gore Rhythms: An Inconvenient Troupe"
• Q: Why did the programmer break up with NP-completeness?
  A: Because NP-completeness took too long to solve their relationship problems; she wasn't efficient enough.
• It is verifiable that I will complete my homeworks for ALGO but it can not be done in polynomial time. ALGO TO SCHEDULE ALGO Homework is NP-complete.
• Why did the algorithms problem not talk?
  It was NPC(omplete).
  idk if this makes sense, i don't play video games

I take issue with

• P=NP only if N=1

And indeed, another (more pedantic) student wrote:

• P=NP
  (N-1)P = 0
  N=1 or P=0

I was offered some non-jokes:

• I like to imagine that all of the NP-complete problems are friends with one another, because they can't feel complete without being reducible to one another.
• I am Not Proud of this exam, but it is Completed.
• I'm NP-complete with this test.
• Ironic for it to be NP-complete but we don't know if P=NP.
• I wish you were NP-complete so that all of our problems could be reduced to you.
• I can decide in polynomial time whether a graph is 3-colorable.

That last student is powerful in a troubling way.

When prompted, "Write a joke about NP-completeness." the most wry student in the class wrote:

• I would tell you one, but once you've heard one you've heard them all.
• I would write a joke about NP-completeness, but once you've heard one you've hard them all!
• I once heard an NP-complete joke but once you've heard one, you've heard them all.
• My verifier could assess a good joke if it saw one, but I don't think this problem can be done in deterministic polynomial time. :)

This post's theme word is lexiphanic (adj), "using pretentious words and language." Very few students attempted lexiphanic answers to test questions.

2021 quotes

 I: "Every online lecture is like a seance: Steve, can you hear me? --- give me a sign!"

Z: "This two-minute hazard distraction video is sponsored by Michael Bay."

re: students: "Let's not traumatize them more than is necessary... it's important to keep our goals realistic."

L: "I sent you the recipe for this sweater."

D: "You're usually an Eagles fan, right?"
M: "I'm an easy and willing turncoat."

F: "What happened? Did you take a pill of youth? You look amazing! Did you shave your beard?"
E: "Four years ago."

L: "I was so tired when I was done that I had to take a nap for two days."

H (regarding his rash): "Did I tell you, they took an autopsy?"

G (petting Ika): "Even [Z] doesn't look at me this deeply."

L (on omicron): "This is great. This is, like, nostalgia for the first part of the pandemic when I ordered groceries all the time."

C (Saturday, 3pm): "I think I can do this whole thing without a trip to Home Depot or Lowe's!" [and actually that came true!]

K: "I mean, who can say which direction the Earth spins in?"
D: "North-to-south. Prove me wrong."

A: "We can't follow every path, because in any kind of interesting code, there are infinitely many paths."

This post's theme word is revet (v), "to recheck or reexamine." Revetting my quote board and I do not remember the context of some of these.

Spring 2021 quotes

 I forgot to write attributions so here are some more-scrambled-than-usual quotes:

"Thank you! You've been sucked into the trap alongside me."
"I like being sucked into the trap."

"Are you going to issue some futures on that party?"

"There's two people in the house, so 'who ate it?' has an air of mystery."

"... the robot spy in your house who you just yell at."

D: "Nine times out of ten, if I have banged my head against it, it turns out the reverse triangle inequality does it."

Z: "That's a good question and I should have asked it, but I was a little flustered."
K: "The title of your memoir!"

D: "Um... this is when I need to have two copies of this book open, to flip back and forth."

"All curly-haired girls have an opinion of which founding father their ponytail looks like."

Z: "I like the policy of 'visitors should be neither seen nor heard.'"

S: "I think these [meetings] will be better in person."
J: "They can't be worse!"

Z: "X and I get into arguments about how to pronounce things. I'm like, I don't know if this is because you are 4 or because I came from a weird place."

G: "Why is that cat looking at the thermostat?"
Z: "I have no idea."

"pull request: check yourself before you wreck yourself, [username1]"

D: "Which is why, when your dog asks you a question, you say, 'That will be answered in the next paper.'"

L: ""My toenails are sore from being inside my socks yesterday."

K: "I'm five minutes into butts."

I: "At some point you can drive this probability high enough that your computer will spontaneously *crumble* with higher probability [than that this will fail]."

D: "I have to say that, until this morning, I was convinced that the three musketeers were mice."

Q: "The kid's clearly a knucklehead."

O: "If I need to, I can buy another computer, which will increase the number of computers in this house by... 1%?"

Z: "Python is the language that has unlimited late days."

Q: "I meant to put myself on mute but I turned off my video because I have no idea how Zoom works anymore."

Y: "I'm [X]'s niece, we won't get into how."

C: "Scraping the hair off your face every day is messing with nature."

Z: "Geocaching --- that's where you bury a server in your backyard."

I: "Beautiful. I did a probability."

J: "Hey, let's completely change everything at once and then try to cope with the ensuing disaster."

G: "Friends and the internet are about the same level of uselessness." 

Z: "Students will misunderstand, no matter what we do."

L: "That was Dad! I never used the word 'dynamite'. I prefer 'plastique'."

M: "You know these kids with college educations --- they can read!"

I: "Alright, what else is new, besides bad weather and rain and your illegal activities?"

K: "How about malaria?"
L: "Malaria is just... very inconvenient."

Z: "I think the idea of food and drink is insane."

Q: "They join the major late and are like, 'I picked up CS35 on the street.'"

I: "This hypercube is reaching the limits of my artistic sophistication."

Z: "Your department seems comparatively... cohesive. You all agree on stuff..."

I: "Knock yourself out on Complexity Zoo. But don't do it for the next half hour, we're in class."

This post's theme word is autokinesy (n), "self-propelled or self-directed motion or energy." The instinct to write down out-of-context quotes for my later self is a bit of psychic autokinesy; it goes back in my notes for more than twenty years.

Spring semester 2019 quotes

The wide-open, glistening white expanses of floor-to-ceiling whiteboard in my office beckon; now there is a regular practice of students (majority: taller than Lila) writing quotes of things said in my office on the top of the whiteboard. This is high above the daily-usable part.

Here is the spring 2019 haul of quotes. Note that most of them were not said by me, even some attributed to other "L" initials. Not all quotes come with attributions. Many different people have initial "A". This is the semester's-end contents of the board, parentheticals and quotation marks included.

"We can't make her not win; though, if she were to have some medical emergency..."

M: "Extend the yellow."
L: "Die a fiery death."

A: "I'm not blaming you. Git is blaming you."

L: "I promise not to beat you with a rubber hose... I reserve the right to other implements."

"this is among the tubes" (in reference to the internet)

"You should hold your cards... better."

S: "I should probably stop procrastinating my real homework with fake homework I create for myself."

A: "My counting's not so great."
L: "You only got up to 2... !"

"I feel strong enough to handwave this." -M

[uncontrollable laughter]
A: "I didn't know Theory of Computation could be so fun."

A: "What a day to leave the stabbing knives at home."

K: "Start stabbing. We got to hurry this up, kiddo, I want dinner."

"[I'm] only as insane as a Turing machine can be"

D: "I don't understand why you have the mallet."
L: "Would you like me to demonstrate on your body?"

A: "I mean, I'm all for your insanity. BUT."

(indignantly) "I don't have an off-by-one error. I was RIGHT."

L: "I voluntarily did this in grad school for 7 years, so parts of me are broken and can't be repaired."

L: "Fuck the Axiom of Choice. There's nothing I can do about it now."

[image of a sheep] BAAA is a string in the regular language Σ*

Feedback

'Tis the season to review the year and my performance. What skills have I improved? What lessons have I learned? What have I achieved? What mistakes did I make, how did I recover, how will I avoid them in the future?

For your reading enjoyment, here is some feedback regarding me:

I'm sure you're well aware that Lila is intelligent, talented, vivacious, and enthusiastic. And these qualities shine forth every day. Lila's abilities are considerable, but what I find even weightier is the wisdom, grace, and poise she demonstrates in managing them. While Lila probably has an interesting and well-reasoned opinion on almost any class topic, she offers these only at the appropriate time and when they are of general interest. Lila has an unusually developed sense of audience. She knows what the moment requires and considers the needs of others. This perspicacity will always serve Lila well. 

I am fortunate to teach many very bright students, many very talented ones, and a number of students who are thoughtful beyond their years. But I have few students for whom all three may be said. Lila is certainly among these. 

... from my seventh-grade English teacher.

I find it interesting to hear (for the first time) this précis of my personality; my memories of seventh grade are not tinged with wisdom, grace, and poise. I do remember worrying about whether my clothing was cool enough; maybe this "sense of audience" extended to other realms. These positive behaviors and this pattern of thoughtfulness in engaging with others is something that I hope I have preserved and carry forward into my daily life, where perspicacity is required and poise is necessary.

I have more recent feedback (from students --- hello, students! I hope you are enjoying your break), but I will not share it here, as it was elicited with promises of anonymity. Suffice it to say that I am carefully considering how to incorporate feedback to make the 2017 release of Lila an even better one. I aspire to be worthy of the same praise that I received in seventh grade.


This post's theme word is blandish, "to coax with flattery." Blandish all you like, these grades are final.

Reunion summary, part II

Months of persistent nagging, often several times a day, was insufficient this time. Most of the class defaulted and failed to submit any self-summary for our next reunion (and accompanying book). This forced the alumni office to give us an extension and step up the guilt-tripping to previously-unexplored reaches of extremity.

Lo! and behold: it worked. Well, a bit. I'll admit that I didn't put as much pizzazz and creative obfuscation into this one as the last one. (In my defense, I now have a job which offers me a lot less free time for creative writing projects on the side.)

My quest for evil mastermindhood continues apace. I have maximally levelled up on the education ladder, and collected one degree of each type (arts, science, philosophy); I now demand to be addressed by my full title ("Professor Doctor Master..."), which is becoming an onerous time-delay during dramatic entries.

Since last we met, I moved to Canada, and then, when that proved insufficiently French, I moved to Paris itself. O! that epitome of French stereotypes: the glorious boulevards, the wine/bread/cheese, the magnificently sneery accents. Many truly marvelous adventures were had, which this margin is too narrow to contain. After nearly a decade abroad, I reluctantly returned to domestic shores in pursuit of that most elusive of quest objectives: tenure.

I return to the US a well-travelled, multilingual, and even-more-highly educated person, all things which serve me well for making small talk and getting pigeonholed. As a professor of computer science, I know a lot about both pigeons and holes. Ask me sometime.

I promise to give you homework. (Due date: the next reunion.)

If unnamed editors change anything, that'll pretty much determine my non-participation in future editions. (Last time they threatened that editors might take action, but the final version was what I had submitted, ridiculosity unchanged.)

These periodic check-ins seem decreasingly relevant in the networked social media sphere in which I dwell: everyone I want to hear about, I already do hear about; we are already in touch. And everyone else? Reading about them in the paper-printed book (!) will be useful, but mostly for tracking how many future CEOs and congresspeople I knew in their early 20s.


This post's theme word is aesculapian, "relating to medicine," or "a doctor." I usually introduce myself as "a doctor, but not the type that helps people", but I am considering condensing this to "a non-aesculapian doctor", to alienate all but the most erudite.

Course message board

There is a homework due this morning.

The single most popular post on the course message board occurred last night.

1:10am: "do we have to finish the problem set even though Trump is winning? we have no will to continue."

Follow-up comments throughout the night:

• "please, I second."
• "Well with the way things are going, will there really be a GPA left for this to ruin anyway? "
• "fourth'd. why is this happening."
• "Murica is now NP Complete"
• "Please Lila"
• "make my GPA great again"
• "Not gpa that doesn't matter right now as much as general health and sanity"
• "not that wall street doesn't matter as much as minority citizens"
• "please reply, we're crying"

My reply upon waking: "It is very important to be educated, as this election highlights." We'll see if  I can remain as anodyne in my not-on-the-permanent-and-searchable-record aloud delivery of lecture this morning.

I'm considering scrapping my network flow lecture to discuss social choice theory and voting (lecture tentatively titled: "Arrow's impossibility theorem, or how math is the reason why we can't have nice things"). On the other hand, the problems we face in the real world are usually not theoretical problems of design and feasibility, but implementation detail problems (e.g., how to check election results) and issues arising from grandfathered-in historical systems which had no rational design to begin with.

This post's theme word is peripeteia (noun), "a sudden or unexpected change of fortune, especially in a literary work. A classic example is Oedipus learning about his parentage." Too crushed by peripeteia for cleverness, the characters shouted "I want out of this novel!" in a fourth-wall-breakingly desperate plea for clemency.

Sainte Chapelle

I revisited the royal chapel today with my favorite PhD tour guide. The usual flair for historical detail and neat technical observations was continued. My photos from inside the chapel were too blurry to convey its awe-inspiring, towering sheets of intricate stained glass, rising up to the heavens, but the outside stonework detailing was also nice.

Stonework on a lower wall panel, exterior of Sainte Chapelle.

And extremely French. They love that fleur-de-lis, it's on everything.

This post's theme word is hagiarchy, "a government by holy persons." The lifelong grooming of a royal saint should not be confused with a hagiarchy; this instance was certainly a helicopter-parent-iarchy.

Towards fluency

Further adventures in my quest towards fluency. (I have long since come to terms with the fact that I will never be as hyperbolically fluent, as precise, as witty, as referential, as in English.)

Part of my continued studies toward fluency involves studying samples of native speech taken from my ambient environment ("eavesdropping"). French-speaking adults are often so soft-spoken in public that it is impossible to hear them, even when they speak directly at one. Children, on the other hand, have not yet been inculcated in the practice of public quietness, and so are audible. Often from a considerable distance.

I was recently told that a particular colloquialism* I am using makes me sound "like a child." Huzzah! I sound like a native-speaking child! Hopefully my language skills will age faster than realtime; I've never heard a child give a presentation about the log-rank conjecture, but I subway commute twice a day so I have many opportunities to overhear such speech, if it ever happens.


This post's theme word is fomes, "an object capable of absorbing and transmitting infectious organisms from one person to another." The subway is a fomes of microbes and memes.


*The colloquialism: finishing sentences with "... ou quoi", meaning roughly "... or whatever." I'm using it as a substitute for words/phrases I don't know, so my sentences trail off but still try to convey some meaning. Sometimes the interlocutor guesses and luckily supplies the word/phrase I wanted, and then I acquire new vocabulary and expressiveness!

Manhood and the gender-parity inflection point

Ack. Here's an article on manhood, with many not-what-I-expected statistics that women are out-earning men, adapting to new social and economic standards, and leaving them behind. Yes, that's right.

It's interesting and befuddling that, in low-income settings, women are so outperforming (and outnumbering) men, while in high-income/status settings (the technology sector comes to mind, as well as higher education) women are discriminated against and an extreme minority. Is there an inflection point,* somewhere on the socioeconomic scale, where men and women have achieved parity?**

I recoil at the suggestion that school needs to be made more "boy-friendly", probably because every other article in my inbox is about how science education needs to be made more "girl-friendly". Dissonance! Although I am soothed by the author's explicit mention that suggested changes to the classroom are "all helpful, and all things that might be appreciated by girls, too."

The article jumps all around, from broad and depressing statistics to accessible anecdotes and prescriptive suggestions from Sweden***. The takeaway message was bafflement, and the unusual and welcome thought that my worldview had been slightly widened to include a world with the statistics and anecdata of this argument. I'm also puzzled why the article is  framed as if gains for women equals (necessitates, requires, produces) losses for men.**** Why must it be a zero-sum game of employment?


This post's theme word is inosculate, "to join or unite." It's intransitive. Who would want to inosculate home, health, and fate with an unpleasant, violent, ill-mannered, uneducated partner?


*An intermediate-value-wish like this one seems unlikely, because the statistics probably aren't dense enough to be continuous. Big discontinuities at: high school diploma, college diploma, parents' socioeconomic indicators, etc.

**On the one hand, I'd like to live at that point, where men and women are equally employed, equally caretakers, equally-represented, equally successful. On the other hand, I probably don't want to move down the socioeconomic scale to reach that point, if I am currently above it.

***This is the parallel of Godwin's Law for articles on issues of economy, family, employment, education, health, or any other aspect of society: the article will, eventually, hold up Sweden as an example.

****On the other hand, the article illustration of a see-saw has a man on one side and no one is playing with him on the other side; yet he is still, inexplicably and in defiance of physics, up.