Today was a meat grinder.
I started working in the morning, had a quick lunch and took a run (hey, it was sunny!). At lunch, I borrowed Juyoung’s laptop charger and kept working.
This continued until around 6:30, when I ran into Eric; he said he and Alexei were just about to make some pizza. I joined. We made a lot of pizza; I contributed some salami and mushrooms. We played foosball while it baked and played some pretty even games.
The pizzas were enormous, yet, Eric, Alexei and I ate nearly all of them. It was ridiculous. We barely had any leftovers. Hung out chatting with them and Betty and Ruth and Tom for a bit longer. Then it was back to work. Problem 4 remained.
Got an intuition for 4.2, and dug into the first part of problem 4.1. Simon shared his solution with me (we’re allowed to collaborate arbitrarily so long as we all do our own write-up), but it appeared that the solution had an error that was impossible to recover from. I was really annoyed when I realized this at the end of writing up my own version of it. But Simon, with some algebraic ju-jitsu, managed to sidestep the problem. I still don’t understand why his patch worked–according to my calculations it shouldn’t have.
I went to bed around 12 and woke up again at 3:30, which was a good call. I was ready to roll. I applied Simon’s patch to my 4.1, busted out 4.3, returned to 4.4 with a vengeance and wrote a really clean version, went back to 4.2, did it my own way and then realized it didn’t work; used a modification from Simon’s solution. Finally, it was down to 4.5 and it was nearly 7am (homework due at 8). I had no way of writing out the complicated bounds on the final probability in time, but I wrote out the rest of the problem, submitted the homework, and went back to bed.
Gratitude Journal
- For waking up properly
- Joining Alexei and Eric for pizza, in particular the jocular grocery run
- You would think I couldn’t improve my understanding of exponentials and logs but in the process of debugging Simon’s solution I think I did! Nested logs and nested exponentials are smaller / bigger than even I thought they would be.