Khawarizmiya

Follow Up February 2, 2009

I have just practically started my winter break few days ago –with respect to my graduate studies not with respect to my work. I still work in the day-time, but just now I realized how precious it is to have some spare time in the evenings, with no classes to attend, no graduate courses projects to work on, and no researching tasks to do! (I apologize from my Advisor if he is reading this post).  Not that this previous semester wasn’t fun, not at all. On the contrary, it was extremely interesting. Algorithmsapproximation was a new topic to me and a new experience. We coded one of the proposed approximations in the literature to an NP-hard problem, in Java language *smiles*. The results were disappointing though to some extent, but reading what Jorge Cham had to say about approximation made me feel better. (Sorry again).

Being a good physicist is knowing how to approximate — You have to decide what is important and what can be ignored. We throw out equation terms all the time, in quantum physics everything is possible, but not everything is likely.

My background in wireless routing protocols was quite poor before working on the Wireless Networks project, I learned a lot from that one as well. Again, it involved Java programming *smiles*, using the Java-based JiST/SWANS package for wireless network simulation. I was also officially done with my Masters project work & Seminar; that was FUN!