Monday, March 17, 2014

ICERM (Brown) Workshop on Stochastic Graph Models

I'll be commuting throughout the week to the ICERM Workshop on Stochastic Graph Models.  ICERM is the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, a new-ish place associated with and walking distance from Brown University, and Eli Upfal (among others) is making sure that it's closely connected with Brown Computer Science as well as other mathematical disciplines.  The building is very nice and new, with a great view of Providence.  It's also very close to the freeway.  (Driving to the ICERM building is not much more time than driving to MSR New England from my house, even though it's more than three times the miles...)

We've already had great talks today by several great people (Leslie Goldberg, Artur Czumaj, Susanne Albers, Flavio Chierichetti, and Gopal Pandurangan), and there's a fantastic schedule for the rest of the week.  If you're in the neighborhood you should come on by.  Leslie's talks on evolutionary dynamics on graphs and Flavio's on trace complexity of network reconstruction were both very close to long-time interests of mine, though it feels like it's been a while since I worked on such "pure" (and very pleasant) random process problems.  I can feel the talks drawing me in...

By the way, has anyone figured out the complexity of the 2048 game yet?  Assuming that the game uses some stochastic model at each step, I wonder what you can say about the probability of getting to 2048 under some model of play.  That's a stochastic model in need of analysis. 

1 comment:

Grigory Yaroslavtsev said...

Thanks for writing about the workshop!