My novelist's version of sensation, of being up against the world, is to keep my nose pressed similarly up to the palpable, mutable, visible, audible, smellable and for the most part disorderly world, flooded as it is with exquisite, intractable, irresistible, details.
If, as almost certainly will be the case, this underlying "explanation" is computationally intractable, and full of irrelevant detail (see section 4 below for more on what this might mean), one might wonder in what sense it is an ideal against which the original explanation should be measured.
A visit this spring with an American Army brigade in southern Afghanistan offered a firsthand look at the conundrum for American soldiers posed by Afghanistan's seemingly intractable opium poppy problem, which was detailed in an article in The New York Times on Sunday.
We obtained written informed consent from nine patients with medically intractable epilepsy (see Table 2 for detailed demographic information) who were undergoing epilepsy monitoring to guide neurosurgical treatment.
The efficient use of the modularity in multicellular models by our symbolic algorithm makes it particularly suitable for analyzing cell-cell communication processes together with complex intracellular pathways, a level of detail that would be intractable for enumerative or simpler symbolic algorithms.
However, computing the score of all possible states in atomistic detail is considered computationally intractable (Istrail, 2000), so our approach uses a philosophy of domain restriction (via schemas) to efficiently predict accurate, physically meaningful amyloid structures at the level of super-secondary structure.
The definition of an amyloid fibril 'state' greatly impacts the accuracy of an ensemble predictor: including atomic details would result in an intractable computation, while high-level representations that work in 1D sequence space can miss important steric and energetic details.
"I saw myself in a cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as they broke eggs into the pan, and five solid meals a day," George Orwell writes in "Down and Out in Paris and London," before going on to describe, in witty, acerbic detail, the merciless demands and intractable hierarchies of hotel kitchens in the City of Light.
Finally, cell population balances capture the partitioning of the intracellular contents in detail, but can quickly become intractable, as the number of biochemical species taken into consideration increases.
But even the administration's signature project in the region — Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — became even more intractable this week, with the publication of confidential documents detailing Palestinian concessions offered in talks with Israel.
