Extracting Poetry from Technical Paper s Prabhakar Ragde Department of Computer Science University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontari o Canada N2L 3G 1 plragde@maytag .waterloo .edu Technical papers are for the most part viewed as dry and soulless reading, written b y authors who have temporarily set aside much of the richness and ambiguity of the Englis h language in order to concentrate on precision and correctness . I believe, however, that deep within the mind of these authors are poetic demons struggling to be allowed free expression , and that echoes of this urge surface in some papers . As a modest example, let me offer the following poem, which was composed during th e first coffee break at FOCS 1989 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina . (There was , you must admit, not much else in the way of recreational options .) I was struck by th e cadences of some of the phrases used in the Proceedings to refer to papers by Mike Luby . Taken together, these phrases form a "found poem ." The words were taken from the paper s "Simulating (log e n)-wise Independence in NC," by Berger and Rompel, "The Probabilistic Method Yields Deterministic Parallel Algorithms," by Motwani, Naor and Naor, an d "Efficient NC Algorithms for Set Cover With Applications to Learning and Geometry," b y Berger, Rompel, and Shor, all of which were presented in the first two sessions . I leave you to draw your own conclusions on what this hidden poem reveals about th e authors of these papers, but I should add that Mike Luby is an old friend of mine ; he has seen the poem, found it suitably amusing, and has circulated it privately . I urge others t o look for hidden poetic expression in STOC and FOCS proceedings . At the very least, it gives you something to do when you need a break during a conference but don't want t o look like you're wasting time . It may even encourage some of our colleagues to reveal their buried talents and embark on a second career publishing in literary journals . Deconstructing Luby one can and cannot us e a trick used by Lub y the one used by Lub y obtaining the expecte d Luby's method is to mak e what is desire d behavior of the greedy still adherin g Luby's technique s take advantage of the freedo m brute force is to o possible with the Lub y give ourselves a fighting chance observe that Lub y
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Extracting Poetry from Technical Paper s
Ragde, Prabhakar
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, Volume 22 (2)
Association for Computing Machinery – May 28, 1991
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