Meeting Agenda - 2000.08.23

August 23rd, 2000

Location:

DC1304

Time:

1:30 p.m.

Chair:

Teresa Ge 

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour last week:

Celine Latulipe

Coffee hour this week:

Coffee hour next week:

3. Next meeting

Date:

Wednesday, August 30th, 2000

Location:

DC1304

Time:

1:30 p.m.

Chair:

Eric Hall 

Technical presentation:

Maggie Dulat 

4. Forthcoming

Chair:

1. Phimphan Isaranuwatchai (September 6th) 
2. Tim Lahey (September 13th) 
3. Josee Lajoie (September 20th) 

Tech Presenters:

1. Teresa Ge (September 6th) 
2. Patrick Gilhuly (September 13th) 
3. Eric hall (September 20th) 

5. Technical Presentation

Presenter:

Erik Demaine 

 

Title:

The Geometry of Glass Slippers

 

Abstract:

Cinderella is a tool for interactive geometry built at ETH Zurich. Its basic feature is to specify some input, then make a geometric construction (using essentially ruler and compass), with the ability to later modify the input. This sounds simple, but it is extremely useful for building geometric intuition, discovering geometric properties and theorems, and precise drawing. Such a system is also easy to implement poorly. Cinderella is "done right" in many ways; for example, changing the input *always* changes the output in a consistent and continuous way, preventing any unsuspected, annoying "jumps." Cinderella automatically discovers geometric relations between objects, using an intriguing and fast randomized theorem prover. This allows you to test, for example, whether a particular point really does lie on a particular line, or whether the appearance is just coincidence or the screen resolution. Cinderella also supports web applets (being written in Java), animations, accurate loci, etc. For more information, see http://www.cinderella.de/.

 

6. General Discussion Items

• refrigerator defrosting time

7. Action List

8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

• 
                           Algorithms and Complexity Group 
   
                                       Seminar
   
                         Wednesday, 23 August 2000 at 3:30PM
   
                                        DC1304
   
                                       -------
   
                            Quantum Kolmogorov Complexity
   
                                     Wim van Dam
   
                          University of California, Berkeley
   
  
                                       ABSTRACT
   
        We give a definition for quantum Kolmogorov complexity.  In the
       classical setting, the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is the length
       of the shortest program that can produce this string as its output. 
       It is a measure of the amount of innate randomness (or information)
       contained in the string. 
  
       We define the quantum Kolmogorov complexity of a string of qubits as
       the length of the shortest quantum input to a universal quantum Turing
       machine that produces the initial qubits with high fidelity. 
  
       Joint work with Andre Berthiaume and Sophie Laplante, Proceedings of
       the 15th Conference on Computational Complexity, pages 240-249 (2000);
       quant-ph no. 0005018.
  

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10. Lab Cleanup