Laura and I at Granville Island
At the beginning of this week, my roommate for the summer, Laura, came in town.Ý She got here on Saturday of the first week,
and called my apartment.Ý For some
reason, I did not answer the phone.Ý She
ended up spending the night in some random neighbors apartment.Ý Then when she called on Sunday morning, I
let her in.Ý I felt bad about that
one.Ý Laura goes to Rose-Hulman in Indiana.Ý
On Monday, when Laura and I walked into work, it was raining hard.Ý We decided to go and get raincoats.Ý We found a store that everyone said would
have good athletic raincoats.Ý We got
the address and directions, and we got on our bikes and started in the correct
direction.Ý It turned out that the
raincoat store was about four miles from our apartment.Ý From UBC (University of British Columbia) to
the store was about half the length of the
city of Vancouver.
For the first part of the week, I just read over the papers
again and tried to do some work.Ý Laura
and I are working on the same project, so I had to wait for her to catch up
(because I got here a week earlier).Ý
Then we began to work on our new algorithm.Ý We are taking an existing algorithm, which is mostly just nested recurrence
relations, and turning it into a more general form.Ý Once we determine this algorithm, we are going to implement it
using Java.Ý Therefore, we are trying to
make the algorithm easily implementable.Ý
However, we are also going to write a paper on it, if it works out.Ý Therefore, we need an algorithm that is relatively
easy to explain and to write down, that is also easily transferable to actual
computer code.
On Thursday, Lauras friend drove in
town from Seattle, and we got our first look at downtown Vancouver.Ý We went to Stanley Park, which is the one
thing in Vancouver that all the tourist brochures mention.Ý It is a huge park this is a peninsula.Ý The 8 km track, which circles the perimeter
of the park, is no more than 2 or 3 meters from the water at any point in
time.Ý In the park, we found totem
poles, people playing cricket, a beaver dam, lots of beautiful trees and
flowers, and a few restaurants.Ý We only
stayed for a few hours, so we did not see everything.
Friday, we worked on our algorithm
some more.Ý Our main problem that we
discovered was in the free energy equations.Ý
The main five recurrence relations depend on four free energy
equations.Ý We discovered that we are
going to have to re-write these four equations also.Ý The easiest way to do this is by cases.Ý One of them has 2^7 different cases, so we are going to have to
find a more efficient means of solving this problem.Ý My notes from this week are here.
That evening, Anne, invited us over
for sushi.Ý The sushi in Vancouver is so
much better than the sushi in Atlanta.Ý
I attribute this to the locations of the cities.Ý All the fish here has just been pulled out
of the water, and all the Atlanta fish is straight off a delivery truck.