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Scientific American article
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 1994 11:30:02 -0500
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 94 11:22:28 EST From: Joseph Traub <traub () cs columbia edu> To: farber () central cis upenn edu Subject: Scientific American The cover story in the January 1994 issue of Scientific American titled "Breaking Intractability" is by Traub and Wozniakowski. It consists of two parts. First its shown how some computationally intractable problems can be solved if one settles for a good solution most but not all of the time. An example of such a problem is high dimensional integration, which must be solved whenever one seeks the expected value of a stochastic process. The method of choice for computing integrals is Monte Carlo. Preliminary results of software testing by a Phd student, Spassimir Paskov, indicates that deterministic methods are superior to Monte Carlo. To date, this testing has been primarily on real-world problems in finance. In the second part of the article we suggest that there might be provable limits to scientific knowledge
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- Scientific American article David Farber (Jan 04)