Since cmng here to Gainesville life's been pretty calm (except for some bothersome issue that crops up everyday :D). One of the problems of learning to live by urself tho is gathering the wealth of experience in the kitchen tht only moms hav usually! The problem lies in gathering tht experience by trial and error and not by the more sophisticated way of lectures!!
Come beginning of sem and one course bothering me is Algorithms! Resorting to my tried and tested way of learning I decide to apply it to real life situations. But what do I pick on that will adequately test my Algo fundas?? Why some daunting household task ofcourse!!
So then one of the household tasks I wage a daily battle with is breakfast! Oh and also evening tea-time. Actually anytime I need butter!! Sounds strange?? Well thts one product thts been a tough nut to crack for me here! Talk about being as soft as butter! :O
What's it thts actually bothering me? Melting tht butter enough to put it on bread smoothly! The systems analyst that I am, I realised after 1-2 days that:
(a) the butter has to be stored in our freezer bcos theres simply no space in the normal portion of the refridgerator.
(b) I need to devise an algorithm for getting the butter to melt enough to put on bread.
(c) The worst case complexity of the algorithm shud be such tht the butter melts in time for me to have breakfast and rush to college.
I began by point (b). Tried out various algorithms for the butter melting.
--> Keeping it outside on the kitchen counter...takes too long.
--> Putting it in the micro and heating...I'd a river of butter and all totally liquid freely flowing...hardly any use and so much wastage!
--> Patting it on a hot pan...one side drips while the other is still rock solid!
--> Holding it under hot water...watery butter or buttery water for breakfast anyone?
So then due to lack of a good algorithm I'm unable to perform any analysis on it and am currently accepting proposals for a good algorithm to melt butter. Criteria...make it as fast as possible!!
On second thoughts, perhaps its one of those computationally infeasible problems??!!
