Talk:1831: Here to Help
So who else read the "Six months later" caption in the voice of the French narrator from SpongeBob Squarepants? 172.68.58.41 23:26, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
Gosh, is Randall making a parallel to someone else who only recently announced that his job is hard, and that nobody knew how complicated things could be? Seems like a clear poke at Trump to me. 108.162.246.23 23:43, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
- EVERYONE feels like that after the election. Get over it. That's right, Jacky720 just signed this (talk | contribs) 23:50, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
Between algorithms and "objectively" establishing that a problem is hard, I took this to be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hardness … --162.158.222.16 00:31, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
- While the people originally having the problem (Megan and Hairy in this case) may not appreciate it (because it wouldn't help SOLVING the problem), establishing that some problem is not only "hard" but specifically NP-hard, AI-hard, equivalent to halting problem or for example equivalent to axiom of choice is important scientific result. -- Hkmaly (talk) 02:03, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
Rather than referencing The Imitation Game, the sentence "[...] now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard." may be referencing instead Awakenings (1990), where Robin William's character says something similar near beginning of the movie.
I think the whole paragraph about informatics at the bottom is missing the point. That explanation is based on the premise that Cueball was told the problem was a "hard problem" (a formal type of problem) and didn't understand. Megan never used the formal term "hard" in describing the problem. She merely said that her field had struggling for years.162.158.79.5 13:13, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
The current explanation is taking a too tactical or literal approach. Throughout history computer science has presented itself as a solution to a variety of hard problems in other fields using a variety of techniques. These include AI, machine learning and now, big data. In most cases the techniques enter with a lot of fanfare, but later flame out, producing no real gains towards solving the hard problem. For example see all the things that computers were promising back in the 1960's. Cueball simply represents a generic version of these past and present CS fads. Sturmovik (talk) 15:42, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
