Rty_777

[Beniamin Mincu |🇺🇸/acc @beniaminmincu]

"I am in this small-ish white room. Alert. Patient. Curious. Been looking forward to this conversation. One by one, a few guys enter and take a seat. A few chairs have been pulled together. Nothing remarkable about the room itself, nothing formal. Just an older building. A plain office room. With a desk or two. There’s something in the people's eyes. A spark. Curiosity maybe. A little anxiety too, from what I can tell. The kind that comes when you know you’re about to step into untried waters. Maybe you have a sense you’re about to be tested, but you’re not entirely sure how. Now everyone is here. Over the previous days, I’ve taken some of the hardest and, to me, most fascinating problems in computer science, broken them down, and given one to each of them as a personal challenge.

The problems matter. As strange as it may sound, I want a new and better solution for each of the problems. I want that solution in an impossible amount of time. But today the problems are only partly the point. The challenge is a filter. If you look at one of these problems and feel daunted by it, if your first instinct is to retreat from its size or complexity, there probably isn’t much I can do to help you. But if you look at the same problem and its difficulty pulls you closer; if it begins to feel less like a wall and more like a puzzle; if, after staring at it long enough, you start to sense a dim, intuitive path toward a solution that comes to you before you can even explain it, then we have something. Then we can really play. I look around the room and take the moment in. I smile. And, for a split second, wonder what may come of it."

https://t.co/xQa8vhmVe4

[Andriescu @Andriescu7]

@beniaminmincu Nice. You’ve got me curious. Now get the damn solutions out of that room and put them on the table.