Editing 664: Academia vs. Business

{{comic
| number    = 664
| date      = November 18, 2009
| title     = Academia vs. Business
| image     = academia_vs_business.png
| titletext = 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, related to {{w|queueing theory}}.

The comic splits into two timelines. In the first he is showing the brilliant solution he'd developed to somebody who can appreciate its elegance, in this case that being an academic who can see the programmer's true brilliance and get him much-earned plaudits from the academic community.

In the alternate timeline, the boss does not possess the knowledge required to comprehend its import, and he simply sees the results without caring about the means Cueball used to attain them. He then gives Cueball another assignment, that may be vastly more workaday in nature. This, sadly, is the usual course of events in bureaucracy, which only seems to care about your results, not how you came about them. To drive in the point, the boss asks Cueball to do something as simple as setting up email on the office phones, a stark contrast to the skill and creativity Cueball would have needed to write his code in the first panel. It may even be imagined to be a "reward in itself" to casually hand over this new problem, however unsatisfying (or unsatisfiable) the new technical issue truly is.

The references in the title text are to the {{w|P versus NP problem}}, a famous unsolved problem in computer science, and the "magical constant" (0x5f375a86) used in finding the {{w|fast inverse square root}}, i.e. solving y=1/√x as fast as possible through a program – no-one knows quite who came up with this very useful bit of code (Now believed to be devised by Greg Walsh at Ardent Computer in consultation with Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB. see wikipedia), but it was discovered hiding in the graphics code of the video game {{w|Quake III Arena}}. Note that the actual constant used in the Quake III source code is 0x5f375'''9df''', but the constant in the title text works also, and is actually slightly more accurate as shown in this paper: [http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/2003/InvSqrt.pdf Fast inverse square root by CHRIS LOMONT (Purdue university, 2003)].

The title text may be a reference to {{w|Stephen Jay Gould}}'s quotation: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” originally about how great minds are suppressed due to racism and their genius go unknown, but could be interpreted as general exploitation by the commercial world.

==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?

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]