When I’m trying to approach a highly specialized topic for the first time, one of my tactics is to find a recording of a research-geared workshop about it and watch it as my introductory crash course. The benefits of this are as follows: I am learning about the subject from (hopefully) a credible expert in the field. Workshops and talks usually try to be self-contained, which means basic background info will likely be given and I won’t have to pore through 10 different research papers, searching for an obscure definition, in vain.

While all NP-hard optimization problems are identical in terms of exact solvability, they may differ wildly from the approximative point of view. If the goal is to obtain an answer that is “good enough”, some problems become much easier (such as KNAPSACK), while others (such as CLIQUE) remain extremely hard.

Graphs can be seen as a way to represent pairwise relationships between objects. With graphs, we have one object type and one relationship type. In one of the most common canonical applications or graph theory, social networking, we are trying to understand and represent social groups using graphs. In that case, our object is people, our pairwise relationship is friendship, and two people have a relationship between them if they are friends.

You’ve started a new job, you’ve stumbled into a conversation that’s been happening for several decades, and you’re feeling way too lost to even begin to follow what anyone is talking about, let alone participate. You’re confused, so you go see John, who seems to be semi-acquainted with the people having the conversation. You briefly sketch out what (you think) you heard, and tell him that you didn’t really understand anything anyone said.

When you call yourself a “talentless hack” (which you probably don’t, but you might if we share a similar sense of humour), it’s likely for one of two reasons: either you’re caught in a situation where you suddenly have to perform or get results or do something, with zero experience or knowledge of what’s going on (at which point feeling like “a hack” is somewhat legitimate), or you’re doing it out of self-deprecation because you have imposter syndrome.