As part of my duties as a graduate student, I presented some of my research on Friday. Beyond the presentation itself, which went well, an intriguing question arose: "If something is so difficult / expensive to implement that no one has written the code, then how do you know what it is?" Indeed. This is an honest criticism, how am I going to explore performance improvements to particular problems when the problems are so computationally expensive that they aren't implemented in existing applications.
Fortunately for my research, the scope of computationally expensive is still well within the feasible realm. Furthermore, many of these expensive problems are already known, and are not so far removed from the current applications as to be independent. So in the end, perhaps it isn't a horrible road block, but rather just one more piece to *research.*
For bonus points, the discussion portion of my presentation ran about the same length as my presentation itself. And spawned further emails in the subsequent days. So I'm delighted by how thought provoking (or perhaps contentious) my research is proving to be.
