Saturday, May 17, 2008

Saturday, last workshop day - May 17th

Last night, social activities interfered with science as we had a very nice workshop dinner at Restaurant Godthem in Djurgården.

Today instead, the last day was celebrated (during an otherwise rainy day) with a lot of program. The audience reached again 40-45 at maximum (the early morning being an exception). The first part was on computer science/physics -related issues, with three long contributions. First Johan Håstad told us why (eg.) MAX-SAT is so very difficult to approximate (actually you can as well try a random assignment...). Then, Ashish Sabharwal and Alexander Hartmann educated the audience more on why Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) are interesting. Ashish talked about how to sample the number of solutions cleverly, and Alex about analyzing clustering in COL and 3-SAT and its relation to what Local Search does. The structure of the CSP solution (and energy) landscape was also addressed in short talks by Frederico Ricci-Tersenghi, Florent Krzakala, and Lenka Zdeborova.
They all presented very recent results.

Finally, the Saturday was finished with some mixed topic -talks, and with Matteo Marsili discussing How to Be Lucky, or how to park (in Marseille).

Hopefully all participants liked this event, in particular those who came to Stockholm/Nordita only for the workshop and not also for the program.

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