That name game...

[Ed Hill]

On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 11:23 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> It is less of a secret now that names are related to each other.
> 
> FC2 was Tettnang, FC3 was Heidelberg, and FC4 is Stentz.  What we need
> is a name that is related to Stentz, but not in the same way that Stentz
> is related to Heidelberg.  Extra credit if there is a semi-easy way out
> of the name for FC6.
> 
> Please start discussing, I'd like to have a list of good names to throw
> at Legal later this week.

There is an algorithm sometimes referred to as "Stentz's Algorithm":

  http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node616.html
  A. Stentz. "Optimal and efficient path planning for 
    partially-known environments."  In Proceedings IEEE 
    International Conference on Robotics & Automation, 
    pages 3310-3317, 1994.

used for finding paths when traversing terrain.  I have no idea whether
it was used by teams competing in the popular DARPA Grand Challenge
autonomous vehicle races but it certainly looks related.

In any case, here are two names known for their association with
optimization algorithms.  And, they have *plenty* of connections to
other topics so they are a "way out" from the current (rather boring)
city-names rut:

  "Metropolis" :  from the Metropolis or Metropolis-Hastings algos for 
    simulated annealing, the traveling salesman problems, etc. which 
    are also used to find optimal paths:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_algorithm

  "Amoeba" :  a common name used to describe the way the Nelder-Mead 
    optimization algorithm and/or how it works.  Nelder-Mead is a 
    very frequently cited paper.  As with the Stentz algorithm (and 
    with many other optimization methods), this algo is "feeling 
    around looking for a better answer".
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelder-Mead_method

Does anyone else here think that Fedora is constantly "trying things
looking for better answers" or is that too much of a stretch?  :-)

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
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