Aidan Delaney’s weblog

Had lectures yesterday with Paul Vitany. I really like the whole subject of Kolmogorov complexity. The fact that it’s uncomputable intrigues me even more. Prof. Harju mentioned today that there would be a lecture at the end of the course on uncomputable problems, like the 3×3 matrix factorisation problem. I’d really like to try some of these problems on Tom’s machine.

Another idea I had was to be able to write a program (on Tom’s machine) that generates all possible parse trees of a context sensitive word (based on a given grammar) in O(1) time. Other ideas come from both Kolmogorov complexity and the possibilty of characterising the set of all possible context free grammars. I’ll probably drop man_monaghan and Tom a mail on this later.

In other news the other students on the course threw a good party for my birthday last night. Beer, pizza, fantastic Spanish wine and Japanese cookies. As per usual Celard, Mihai and I were the only ones to last the party Mihai has a guitar and sang a few Romanian folk songs, he’s pretty damn good.

On the way home Celard had the bright idea to call friends. I called Dez first, when I told him it was my birthday and I was drunk he seemed to accept my phone call as a logical conclusion. Lori was a bit more tired, but it was fun to wake her.

“We’re two monkeys, two knives and a lot of beer short of a drunken monkey knife-fight.”

Although this is worthy of Quinten Tarrentino, this gem comes from closer to home. Well done Dave for making the water I was drinking slosh over my keyboard via my nose.

Was “drunken monkey style” last night. I went out with Zelat and Artium. Bars here don’t close untill 6am and we went from bar to bar untill we got thrown out.

I’m going to get some water, some chinese tea (which is really nice) and get on to reading about semigroups and monoids. It’s fun really.

I got home late last night and nearly didn’t get up this morning! I was drinking with two Germans a Romanian and a Hungarian. All very interesting people. One of the Germans is man_monaghan’s (his name has been changed to protect the innocent) old room mate.

Getting well stuck into this theory stuff now, but the work day still promises to be long. I didn’t understand that the Spanish actually “work” a 12 hour day. They take a 3 hour break for siesta, but we don’t get that. I’m learning a little Spanish too.

Again, I’m rushing off to a lecture.

I’ve got ten minutes till I get the bus so here’s an update. I’m going for a beer with Sebastian who is working on some automata with the exact properties that we have been looking for the past six months,

• determinism,
• minimal normal form,
• calculus to guard against stupid programming errors (realated to the normal form).

The complexity of his model ain’t half bad either. They’re MSOTT or monadic second order logic based tree translators.

At the moment there are five of us on the course, but we’re expecting another three. So untill they get here I have an office to myself GuangWu is Chinese and my room mate, he’s easy to get on with and has a good sense of humor. Zelat is Romanian with perfect English, Tero (her nickname) is Mongolian, but has been studyong in Japan for a few years and Mihai who is also Romanian and kind of our guide. There’s a large Romanian contingent here as there seems to be a large community of Romanian formal language researchers, presumably in part to do with Prof. Solomon Marcus and others like Paun. Four of the five speakers I have heard so far are Romanian.

The accomodation, as I have said, is decent. The food is decent too. The Spanish seem to keep to strange hours though. We start at 9:00 in the morning (bus at 8:20) and break for lunch at 13:00. Lunch is in a large canteen building which we share with several secondary schools. I forgot to mention that the lecture theatre and my office are not actually in the University campus, but are in Chernobyl. Or at least that’s what they call it. The surrounds are one of the largest petro-chemical industrial parks in Europe. The park is huge, so large that Mihai informed me that due to a terrrorist treat a few years ago, the whole city of Tarragona had to be evacuated!

Anyway, back to lunch, which finishes at 15:00. We finish our day at 21:00, but Sebastian finished his lecture early today so I’ve time to type this. I’ve been doing work when I get back to the residence, but I won’t tonight (even though I need to). I think I can postpone it untill Saturday.

Gotta go for the bus…Can someone email me when the Gentoo ebuilds for Gnome 2.6 are ready, as I’ve no time to poll their server (I’m looking at you Vish).

I’m studying 12 hours a day at the moment so I won’t have time to blog untill the weekend.

I can’t get through to some people still (most notably Lori). So I want to wish Lorraine a big happy birthday from here. And I suppose I should post up somthing about my travels.

I flew Ryanair to Girona. The weather in Dublin was crap and I was glad to see a nice dusky mediterranian evening when we touched down in Girona. Girona is 110km north of Barcalona. Getting to Barcalona was easy, I took the provided bus. However, we were let off at some place in Barcelona and I had no idea where the train station was. I wandered around for an hour and a half untill I figured out which Metro lines to get to Sans Estacio, which means Sans station. It all seems easy in hindsight, but I was actually looking for Barcelona Sans, as per my directions from the course organiser, and there are three stations with sans in the title in Barca, Placya de Sans, St. Sans and Sans Estacio. I made the train to Tarragona with 5 minutes to spare.

I shared a cabin on the train with a Dr. from Greece who was convinced that everything has a greek origin. He was exactly like the character in the film “My big fat greek wedding”. Did you know that Ireland was founded by greeks? Seemingly the story is that one of the sons of Hercules was the leader of the Celts. The Celts begat Ireland thus by the rules of implication Greeks => Celts => Ireland, the Greeks => Ireland. I agreed with the chap, it was easier to nod and smile for an hour than to argue. Besides, I was tired after lugging my 27kg case around Barca.

Tarragona is a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. The buildings in the center of the town are all huge. It seems a nice spot though and I’m enjoying it. The food from the canteen is really good, which makes a change from Maynooth. I had some kind of lamb stew today where the lamb was served on the bone. The accomodation is decent too. There are five showers (for males) in my dorm which will hopefully be plenty.

I sat talking with GuanWu Liu (my roommate) this morning over a cup of Chinese tea. His english is pretty decent and I’m confident we’ll get on.

I got internet access The wireless dosn’t seem to do dhcp, but wired does.

I’m sharing a room with a very nice Chinese guy, he’s a ship engineer by trade but is in Tarragona to study formal languages.

I tried to upload some images of the weather in Dublin and Barcalona but failed I’ll take some photos today and upload them to MiNDS> later.

I’m sitting in Dublin airport, using the free wireless access. I’ll be boarding the plane in about 40 minutes and hope to get my connecting train from Gerona to Tarragona.

As I’m going away to study, I brought loads of books with me. This made my bag 12kg overweight and on Ryanair that implies (12*6) €72. That’s the same price as my ticket! I’ll be checking the aerlingus maximum weight on my way back.

I was hoping to use gnome-blog to post my entrys. Unfortunalty b2++’s bloggerAPI is a little old, and there’s somthing wrong with authentication. I’ve set up a test system on my laptop and have fixed the problem. I didn’t have time to give the patches to donnacha though. Maybe I’ll have time next week, though I expect to be very busy.