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Evolutionary game theory presentation, and why I’d hesitate to use PowerPoint again

Saturday, 8 September 2007 in Honours, Science by Enoch Lau | No comments

This semester, we’ve been taking a course called “Algorithmic Game Theory”, which is the broad area that my thesis topic belongs in. Although Tasos is the course coordinator, and lectured the first couple of lectures, the bulk of the “lecturing” has fallen to the students in the course.

Last week was my turn, and I did my talk on evolutionary game theory. I had been interested in that ever since I read Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, where he makes use of evolutionary game theory, albeit in a non-mathematical way, to explain his ideas for the evolution of genes. In a nutshell, evolutionary game theory allows you look at the evolution of strategies/genes/behaviours in a large population of organisms. For example, can a mutant gene overtake an incumbent gene? See the link before for more information, or read my lecture slides: evolutionary.pptx, evolutionary.pdf.

Now, onto the second half of the post’s title: why I’d hesitate to use PowerPoint again. I’ll begin with a clarification: why I’d hesitate to use PowerPoint again where I need to use equations at all. (If you’re an OpenOffice fan and you’re beginning to smirk, here’s something to wipe your smirk off: OpenOffice Impress fails to impress me even more dramatically. Sorry.)

I’ve been using LaTeX with Beamer for my presentations this year, and I’ve had a good experience with it so far. Why did I use PowerPoint? Mainly because I haven’t used PowerPoint 2007 for any real purpose so far, and secondly, because I saw that Word 2007 had a new flashy equation editor that’s kind of nice. It was a bit of a disappointment for me when I had finished writing all the slides with no maths to find that PowerPoint somehow failed to inherit this. Back to old Equation Editor. I hate it, so I took to doing the equations in Word and then copying them over as pictures. The main problem with all this is that, for a mathematical presentation, equations should not be treated as pictures. PowerPoint and OpenOffice both lack the ability to insert equations as inline text, and that frustrates me to no end. Another minor little gripe is that there’s no in-built way to have navigation bars like you do in Beamer.

The shocking thing is that most lecturers in academia, such as the School of IT, continue to use PowerPoint even though the set of tools it provides for technical presentations is minimal. (If you’re doing a sales pitch with pie charts and dot points, it’s fine.) Unfortunately, this just means there’s little incentive for Microsoft to go and improve the tools for this important market segment.

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Installing software, and other things casual webmasters should know

Saturday, 11 August 2007 in Computing by Enoch Lau | No comments

In this tutorial, I’m going to write about a number of things that will be useful to you if you have your own website hosting. This article is geared for beginners, and requires no prerequisites apart from some common sense! Now, I host nointrigue.com on a shared Linux server with Bluehost, which means that my website shares a physical computer with a number of other users. This setup is fairly common, so I’ll be writing with an assumption that this is the kind of arrangement that you have. I’ll cover some basic, but useful, shell commands to make your life easier, and explain how to install additional software on your host.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The moral of the story is…

Saturday, 2 June 2007 in Honours by Enoch Lau | No comments

A couple of weeks ago, I presented at the Algorithms Reading Group two papers that I had previously read for my honours work. The first week, I presented How Bad is Selfish Routing? (Roughgarden and Tardos), and that attempt was … let’s just say that there was (substantial) room for improvement in the presentation style. Several points to take away:

  • Slides don’t really help in presenting a paper: the mode of delivery of a paper is necessarily different to that of a lecture. It’s much more dense, and the bite-sized chunks that slides give you don’t do justice to the material in the paper, and in fact, make it harder to follow. For example, definitions are great, but when taken off the page and onto several slides-worth of definitions, your eyes do glaze over.
  • Sleep is useful: never present after getting very little sleep
  • Know the details very well: you might think you know the paper well, but when presenting a paper, you need to know how each part can be obtained with precision. People will ask you things you’ve never thought about. It’s often stated that you only know something well when you can teach it. Corollary: practise presentations before giving them.

Overall, it was a good first attempt. I’m quite proud of the slides still, and they might be useful for someone starting out in this area: they can be downloaded here (handout). This was my first attempt at using the LaTeX Beamer class, and I must say that I’m now a convert. PowerPoint has its uses still, but definitely not for very technical talks.*

The second attempt was far better. This was presenting The Price of Routing Unsplittable Flow (Awerbuch, Azar and Epstein), and I did the entire thing with a whiteboard and a marker… and I rehearsed it with Tasos. I walked into it feeling more confident, and I felt that the audience walked out of it with a good understanding of the paper’s contents.

For another honours-related moral: Don’t edit your work after you’ve written it. Just hand it in. Bizarre? Well, it turned out that while editing the Research Approach document after discussing it with my supervisor, I accidentally deleted half of a sentence and didn’t realise it. The marker adjusted the mark accordingly. Fine, to be fair, it should be: Don’t edit your work when you’re half asleep. The mistake is now corrected.

Footnote:
* I recently got Mathematica 6, and there’s a new slide show view - so that might be a good way to go for those who don’t like typing LaTeX code. As an aside, I’m quite impressed with the new visualisation capabilities of Mathematica 6, and I’ll be sure to use it in my work.

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Literature review done

Thursday, 3 May 2007 in Honours by Enoch Lau | No comments

The honours project has made some headway with the completion of the literature review. The purpose of a literature review in an honours project is to examine what researchers in the field have done previously, in a bid to identify a niche for your project - because the contribution you make must be a novel contribution. In the completed thesis, it will eventually go at the beginning, together with a survey of some basic mathematical theory (because I’m doing theoretical CS).

I’ve uploaded it here for all to view, and it’s good as a quick overview of the field of selfish routing and the price of anarchy. (I’ve also uploaded my project abstract and my literature search, and started using my wiki for Honours-related work.)

Together with Tasos, we looked at number of things at the last meeting: namely (what we’ve termed) inverse congestion games (where congestion is good) and simply inverting the edge cost functions.

Just a couple of thoughts about using a wiki for honours: OneNote is definitely out of the question because it doesn’t support maths (it doesn’t even support the maths AutoCorrect found in Word 2007 - which makes little sense). I could type everything in LaTeX but then it’s a nightmare to navigate, and just jotting down a quick note means a recompile. MediaWiki is a good compromise, as it has maths support, although the resulting page looks rather ugly (because of the difference between the maths font and the text font), and for some reason, some LaTeX commands are missing (e.g. \succ) even though everything else in their package works.

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EndNote & References in Word 2007

Monday, 19 March 2007 in Computing, Honours by Enoch Lau | No comments

I just installed EndNode, and I intend to use that to help me keep track of the plethora of papers that I’ll be reading throughout the year. I intend to do my thesis in LaTeX, so BibTeX export is important, which EndNote can do.

However, I took a look at Word 2007’s Reference tab for the first time today, and I must say I’m impressed with the new set of tools available (maybe it’s not new? just hidden away previously?). In particular, I like the ability to manage your sources like EndNote does (see screenshot), but the lack of BibTeX export will stop me from using it (but I will consider using it when I return to law, where I do my assignments in Word). I also like the ability to mark words for inclusion in the index.

word2007ref.png

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