Right now, I have a painfully-large stack of unwritten research papers. Many of these are “paperlets”: cool things I noticed that I want to tell people about, but that would require a lot more development before they became competitive for any major theoretical computer science conference. And what with the baby, I simply don’t have time anymore for the kind of obsessive, single-minded, all-nighter-filled effort needed to bulk my paperlets up. So starting today, I’m going to try turning some of my paperlets into blog posts. I don’t mean advertisements or sneak previews for papers, but replacements for papers: blog posts that constitute the entirety of what I have to say for now about some research topic. “Peer reviewing” (whether signed or anonymous) can take place in the comments section, and “citation” can be done by URL. The hope is that, much like with 17th-century scientists who communicated results by letter, this will make it easier to get my paperlets done: after all, I’m not writing Official Papers, just blogging for colleagues and friends.
Scott Aaronson has a post on the computational power of digicomps. While the post itself is interesting, it is also worth noting here because it is part of a new experiment he is doing. He writes: