While setting goals and performing evaluations for a modest grant, like one given to a small after-school program, can be relatively simple, huge grants that finance experimental programs for intractable problems — poverty, say — are more like a moonshot.
Understanding the effectiveness and the applicability of data reduction as a technique for designing heuristics for intractable problems has been one of the main motivations in studying the phase transition of randomly-generated instances of NP-complete problems.
Having immersed themselves in a subject, almost all succumb to the hubristic idea that they can find new and unique ideas for solving intractable problems.
Sir Gordon Conway, professor of international development at Imperial College London, said it was important for pro-GM campaigners not to overstate their case, but it could be useful for some intractable problems.
Having recently stepped down from the position, many agree he's done a great job in difficult circumstances; over four years, pragmatic solutions for seemingly intractable problems have been found, complaints have decreased, and the night time economy has continued to grow and diversify.
This is especially true for the seemingly intractable problems that have plagues us for decades, if not centuries.
For his part, he contends that the I.M.F. did what it could for countries with intractable problems, and that the critics' approaches would have made troubled economies even weaker.
Twice in his hastily arranged announcement at the White House today, Barack Obama insisted that he wasn't following the standard Presidential script for dealing with intractable problems: set up a panel of worthies to take evidence, hold hearings, and eventually produce a doorstop of a report.
My research output, though, was fairly underwhelming, again partly due to my making a beeline for the most intractable problems and almost solving them.
With variations, these are wars amongst the people, and they present seeming intractable problems for conventional forces.
Algorithms for solving hard, or intractable, problems, on the other hand, require times that are exponential functions of the problem size n.
