Day 3 started off with a panel moderated by Anna Karlin, starring Cynthia Dwork, Russell Impagliazzo, Ankur Moitra, Tim Roughgarden, Dan Spielman and Andy Yao. I personally like panels to have a bit of an edge and controversy, and there wasn't that much of it here, but there was some good discussion about various aspects of TCS, as well as some good advice for the young'uns in the audience. Some of the highlights:
- Andy Yao thinks a working quantum computing device is imminent, but one that we could solve Rubik's cube puzzles on might take a while longer.
- Cynthia Dwork made a strong argument for the power of theoryCS to define problems clearly and rigorously even for messy concepts like privacy and fairness.
- Ankur Moitra made a point that I think should be made more often: that modeling and algorithm design are fundamentally different things even if they might be influenced by one another. And it's important not to confuse the two.
- Dan Spielman tried to emphasize that even if it might seem like senior people at a conference know what they're talking about, they don't really know. And that's it's ok to be in a constant state of befuddlement. As Anna Karlin put it I think, "We must learn to dance with chaos".
There was lots more that the panel discussed, but these are what stuck in my mind. One pity was that we ran out of time and couldn't have any audience questions.
As I had mentioned earlier, there were networking lunches for senior (aaaah, I'm a senior now :() and junior people. Never one to let of a chance to pontificate, I had lunch with Sima Hajiaghaei (UVic), Lalla Mouatadid (Toronto), Benjamin Priest (Dartmouth) (ed: you need a website!) and Shravas Rao (NYU) at a nice dumpling place in Chinatown. They won't like me saying this, but I will anyway :) - they all seemed so young and enthusiastic I felt a little old. But we had a great chat, and if you bump into any of them at a theory conference in a future make sure to say hi :).
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