664: Academia vs. Business

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Academia vs. Business

Title text: Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.

Explanation

Cueball has solved some tricky and very important problem in computer science.

The comic splits into two timelines. Showing the brilliant computer code he'd written to somebody who actually knows computer code allows the academician to see the programmer's true brilliance and get him much-earned plaudits from the academic community.

In the alternate timeline (implied to be what actually happens), the boss, not possessing that knowledge, simply sees the results, and not the means Cueball used to attain them. He then gives Cueball another assignment. This, sadly, is Truth in Television, as the private sector seems to only care about your results, not how you came about them.

The problems mentioned in the title text are the P versus NP problem and finding the fast inverse square root.

Transcript

[Cueball sits at a desk in front of a computer. There are cans on the desk and more crushed ones on the floor.]

Cueball: I just wrote the most beautiful code of my life.

Cueball: They casually handed me an impossible problem. In 48 hours and 200 lines, I SOLVED it.

[Lines divide the comic into two possible end panels here, labeled "Academia" and "Business."]

[Academia]

Professor: My god ... this will mean a half-dozen papers, a thesis or two, and a paragraph in every textbook on queuing theory!

[Business]

Boss: You got the program to stop jamming up? Great. While you're fixing stuff, can you get Outlook to sync with our new phones?

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Discussion

I'm not convinced the problem solved in the comic panels is the fast inverse square root in the title text, as the academia panel implies that it impacts queuing theory, and I'm not sure what fast inv sqrt has to do with queuing theory. 204.89.186.1 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Agreed. Fast inv sqrt is clearly referenced in the title text, but the problem in the comic is something else. Alpha (talk) 01:18, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

If this ever happened to me, I would quietly release the solution under the GNU license. My getting fired (possibly) is totally worth the public technological progress highly into the future. Greyson (talk) 13:29, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

The explanation is an interesting contrast to my interpretation. The meaning I got was that in academia, this discovery, like any new discovery, is interesting; but in business, this discovery has little practical application (apart from finishing what he was doing) so his boss didn't think twice about it. Maybe I'm too cynical.--18.215.1.155 01:23, 13 May 2013 (UTC)