Most trees you’ll see in Computer Science literature are rooted on top and spread downwards. Why do CS folks call them tree then? Well, common wisdom is that they never went out of the room, so they never saw a real tree.
No offense. I am a CS theory guy myself. I read this joke a long time back, when I was tutoring an undergraduate class, in this book. A group of theorists was discussing some open problems, that could be trivial (but nobody could see the triviality) to solve, and the joke was mentioned. Open problems that could be trivially settled?! Some kind of tomfoolery! Well, not going out of their rooms might just be true..Not seeing a real tree is not.
Prof. Erik Demaine has updated the survey paper titled “Playing Games with Algorithms: Algorithmic Combinatorial Game Theory.” The recent update appears after a long wait of 7 years and has Prof. Bob Hearn as a coauthor.
The paper presents interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory –many of which remain open– with the purpose to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research.