I think I now know why I had difficulty getting funding

I tried explaining my PhD work to someone over dinner. He was an ex-EE type, degree in electronics, PhD in information theory, so he could at least get the gist. Anyway, it became apparent quite quickly, after mentioning what I was trying to do, that he just flat-out didn't believe it was possible.

I did a mental rewind of what I'd been talking about, and actually I would be inclined to agree, but for one thing: I already know the technology works, because I've actually made the 'big result' work once already. Clearly, I'm going to have to work pretty hard to show that what I'm doing is both feasible and actually not a complete fraud -- PE sounds impossible, at best something that should be NP-complete and not doable in a general sense. But, no -- it does totally work, and even can be shown to be near enough time and space linear with the size of the generated hardware.

Someone said that one should never worry about good ideas being stolen -- the best ideas take a lifetime's effort to become recognised, ramming them down as many throats as possible. I suspect that hardware PE is going to be one of those. I was talking to someone 'in the know' a couple of weeks ago, who said that there would be no way that a chip company would fund this kind of research, despite its potential impact on the way that chips are designed. Seemingly, EEs are ultra-conservative, running a mile at any mention of the 'F-word' (functional programming). PE is probably an order of magnitude scarier.

This is scary. It definitely doesn't bode well for publication, and I'm going to have to show 'extraordinary evidence' to back up my 'extraordinary' claim. The annoying part of this is that PE has been known about since 1920ish (Kleene's s-m-n theorem), and was shown to work for software decades ago. Compiler hackers don't flinch at this stuff, it's just the electronics types.

So, since my funding applications all went out to chip companies and the tier of EDA companies that support them, it follows that none of them would even vaguely consider what I was suggesting. If I failed, they would waste their money. If I succeeded, I'd be upsetting the food chain horribly.

Luckily, my funding has nothing to do with the chip industry. My IPR is my own, so I don't have those concerns directly. However, the bigger problem will probably be in getting published -- the compilery people may be put off by the EE, and the EE people may well just think I'm bluffing.

Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound...

I was a bad fluffy

I've been chatting with our college computer officer, Espen Koht. He did indeed cut off my comms. He was right to do so -- I shouldn't have set everything up without talking to him first. The fact that I didn't know I needed to is some small defense, but...

Sorry, Espen.

I really don't envy his task. I spend most of my time trying to avoid being roped into admin, but he has nowhere to hide from the lemming-like tendencies of inexperienced computer users. Whilst I know what I'm doing and had good reasons for everything, someone wathing my TCP traffic would probably conclude that I was a KGB-trained spy-lemming, hell bent on extremely secure (but sneaky) self-destruction, and would be quite right to hit the big red James Bond ejector-seat button and have done with me.

* hides, bashfully *

My journal is now registered users only

After an abusive comment to one of my blog entries (now deleted), I have put my journal into 'only registered users can comment' mode. Also, comments by non-friends are now screened by me. Apologies if this causes any difficulties for anyone.

But, to my anonymous cowardly commentator, all I can say is this: go fuck yourself.

Some notes about the 5-value logic idea

... are here, in the unlikely event that anyone's interested. It's still at-best quarter-baked, I still need to figure out how to handle feedback properly. But it does get the idea across anyway.