Dr. Dobb's Journal - August 2008 - (Page 16)

Strategic Vision by Jack Woehr A Conversation With Christos Papadimitriou Christos Papadimitriou, the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, is this year’s recipient of the Katyanagi Prize for Research Excellence. Carnegie Mellon University has cited Dr. Papadimitriou as “an internationally recognized expert on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to databases, optimization, artificial Christos Papadimitriou Photo courtesy of Peg Skorpinsk intelligence, networks and game theory.” We recently spoke with Papadimitriou, where among other topics we delved into the underpinnings of science, the economics of the programming market, the mysterious complexity of the Web, quantum computing, and the computer scientist as popular novelist. Next month, we talk with Dr. Erik Demaine, recipient of this year’s Katyanagi Emerging Leadership Prize. DDJ: Congratulations on the Katyanagi Award. CP: I didn’t know I had been nominated. When the chairman of the committee e-mailed me about the prize, I skimmed the e-mail quickly. She mentioned the previous winner, so I thought someone else won the prize and that I was invited to speak at the ceremony. I replied, “Yeah, okay, let me think about it, give me a week…” She wrote back in astonishment, thinking I was not accepting the prize! DDJ: You certainly cover wide territory in your papers. One that interests me in particular is “On the Complexity of Protein Folding.” I was just discussing the same subject with your co-Katyanagi honoree, Erik Demaine, recently. Have you two worked together? CP: No, we talked briefly after I heard him mention his work in his talk at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s a fascinating problem. It’s something people have called “Leventhal’s Paradox.” How come these stupid amino acids know how to fold in a millisecond and we can’t with the most powerful computers figure it out in ages? Erik and his colleagues have a very nice explanation for this: The proteins get a lot of geometric help from the ribosomes and the chaperones. I had a different idea: It’s a very hard problem for proteins to fold. Nobody can solve it, not even proteins themselves. Except that evolution has selected the proteins that know how to solve it. In simpler organisms, not much precision is needed. For more complex organisms, a great deal of precision. Sometimes proteins require very exact shapes because they are engaged in certain exercises. They stick together, they can grab to hold other molecules. 16 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l August 2008 DDJ: So when you’re talking about “simpler forms of life”: You don’t mean the difference between microbe and macrobe, you mean perhaps the difference between a microbe and a virus? CP: This is not precisely my field, but I think there is question whether a virus is “alive” or not. A virus doesn’t figure in the tree of life as currently described. DDJ: I guess it depends on how you define “life.” Does a virus have a soul? CP: It can kill me, but can it recite poetry? [Laughs] Perhaps such categorization is anthropocentric. DDJ: Diverging from the philosophical to the mundane, your work on protein folding touches on an interesting economic phenomenon. Dr. Dobb’s Journal is a magazine that addresses working programmers. As we pursue our careers, are we going to be sucked into biotech in large numbers? CP: I would say that, quite generally, computer scientists are going to find themselves interacting more with other fields. I encourage my students to go completely wild in their curriculum, to go out and learn not only that which they think they should learn in order to be good computer scientists—usually mathematics and programming and engineering and so on—but learn about everything else, about psychology, economics, about business, about biology, about the humanities. I think the future belongs to programmers who are well-rounded people who have diverse interests, who are flexible, who understand deeply other fields and are ready to transform them. Biotech is definitely part of the picture, but it’s not unique. http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - August 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - August 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook A Conversation with Christos Papadimitriou OpenGL and Mobile Devices: Round 2 Ellipse Specification Using Vectors Embed Custom GUIs in WPF Building RIAs on J2EE Foundations Disentangling Concepts in Object-Oriented Systems The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - August 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.