Several submissions contained perspectives, tricks, or counterexamples that were new to us. We were quite happy to see so many people engaging with ELK, and we were surprised by the number and quality of submissions.
A thing I’m curious about: what’s your ‘current overall view’ on ELK? Is this:
A problem we don’t know how to solve, and which we’re moderately confident can’t be solved (because of our success at generating counterexamples)
A problem we don’t know how to solve, where we think rapid progress is being made (as we’re still building out the example-counterexample graph, and are optimistic that we’ll find an example without counterexamples)
A problem that we’re pretty sure can’t be solved, but which we think can be sidestepped with some relaxation (and looking at the example-counterexample graph in detail will help find those relaxations)
From my perspective, ELK is currently very much “A problem we don’t know how to solve, where we think rapid progress is being made (as we’re still building out the example-counterexample graph, and are optimistic that we’ll find an example without counterexamples)” There’s some question of what “rapid” means, but I think we’re on track for what we wrote in the ELK doc: “we’re optimistic that within a year we will have made significant progress either towards a solution or towards a clear sense of why the problem is hard.”
We’ve spent ~9 months on the problem so far, so it feels like we’ve mostly ruled out it being an easy problem that can be solved with a “simple trick”, but it very much doesn’t feel like we’ve hit on anything like a core obstruction. I think we still have multiple threads that are still live and that we’re still learning things about the problem as we try to pull on those threads.
I’m still pretty interested in aiming for a solution to the entire problem (in the worst case), which I currently think is still plausible (maybe 1/3rd chance?). I don’t think we’re likely to relax the problem until we find a counterexample that seems like a fundamental reason why the original problem wasn’t possible. Another way of saying this is that we’re working on ELK because of a set of core intuitions about why it ought to be possible and we’ll probably keep working on it until those core intuitions have been shown to be flawed (or we’ve been chugging away for a long time without any tangible progress).
I don’t think we’re likely to relax the problem until we find a counterexample that seems like a fundamental reason why the original problem wasn’t possible.
A thing I’m curious about: what’s your ‘current overall view’ on ELK? Is this:
A problem we don’t know how to solve, and which we’re moderately confident can’t be solved (because of our success at generating counterexamples)
A problem we don’t know how to solve, where we think rapid progress is being made (as we’re still building out the example-counterexample graph, and are optimistic that we’ll find an example without counterexamples)
A problem that we’re pretty sure can’t be solved, but which we think can be sidestepped with some relaxation (and looking at the example-counterexample graph in detail will help find those relaxations)
Something else?
From my perspective, ELK is currently very much “A problem we don’t know how to solve, where we think rapid progress is being made (as we’re still building out the example-counterexample graph, and are optimistic that we’ll find an example without counterexamples)” There’s some question of what “rapid” means, but I think we’re on track for what we wrote in the ELK doc: “we’re optimistic that within a year we will have made significant progress either towards a solution or towards a clear sense of why the problem is hard.”
We’ve spent ~9 months on the problem so far, so it feels like we’ve mostly ruled out it being an easy problem that can be solved with a “simple trick”, but it very much doesn’t feel like we’ve hit on anything like a core obstruction. I think we still have multiple threads that are still live and that we’re still learning things about the problem as we try to pull on those threads.
I’m still pretty interested in aiming for a solution to the entire problem (in the worst case), which I currently think is still plausible (maybe 1/3rd chance?). I don’t think we’re likely to relax the problem until we find a counterexample that seems like a fundamental reason why the original problem wasn’t possible. Another way of saying this is that we’re working on ELK because of a set of core intuitions about why it ought to be possible and we’ll probably keep working on it until those core intuitions have been shown to be flawed (or we’ve been chugging away for a long time without any tangible progress).
I continue to think that this is a mistake that locks out the most promising directions for solving it. It’s a well-known constraint that models are generally underdetermined, so you need some sort of structural solution to this underdetermination, which you can’t have if it must work for all models.