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<eventdefs>
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<!-- Winter 2010 -->
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<eventitem date="2010-03-16" time="4:30 PM" room="MC5158" title="Approximation Hardness and the Unique Games Conjecture">
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<short><p>The fifth installment in CS10: Undergraduate Seminars in CS, features CSC member Elyot Grant introducing the theory of approximation algorithms. Fun times and a lack of gruesome math are promised.
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</p></short>
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<abstract><p>The theory of NP-completeness suggests that some problems in CS are inherently hard—that is,
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there is likely no possible algorithm that can efficiently solve them. Unfortunately, many of
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these problems are ones that people in the real world genuinely want to solve! How depressing!
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What can one do when faced with a real-life industrial optimization problem whose solution may
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save millions of dollars but is probably impossible to determine without trillions of
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years of computation time?
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</p><p>One strategy is to be content with an approximate (but provably "almost ideal") solution, and from
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here arises the theory of approximation algorithms. However, this theory also has a depressing side,
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as many well-known optimization problems have been shown to be provably hard to approximate well.
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</p><p>This talk shall focus on the depressing. We will prove that various optimization problems (such as
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traveling salesman and max directed disjoint paths) are impossible to approximate well unless P=NP.
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These proofs are easy to understand and are REALLY COOL thanks to their use of very slick reductions.
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</p><p>We shall explore many NP-hard optimization problems and state the performance of the best known
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approximation algorithms and best known hardness results. Tons of open problems will be mentioned,
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including the unique games conjecture, which, if proven true, implies the optimality of many of the
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best known approximation algorithms for NP-complete problems like MAX-CUT and INDEPENDENT SET.
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</p><p>I promise fun times and no gruesome math. Basic knowledge of graph theory and computational
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complexity might help but is not required.
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</p></abstract>
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</eventitem>
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<eventitem date="2010-03-12" time="7:00 PM" room="Comfy Lounge" title="A Party of Code">
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<short><p>A fevered night of code, friends, fun, energy drinks, and the CSC.
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