---
layout: post
title: Somehow this isn't fair
date: 2006-10-22
tags: ["General"]
---

Go look at this [cartoon](http://xkcd.com/c173.html) (I will stipulate before anyone says anything that this post will have less meaning to the non-CS people in the audience, sorry).

What isn't fair about this?  I mean the joke is funny, I agree.  The problem is that given that I am taking Analysis of Algorithms this semester all I can think about when I read it is how one should solve the problem.  My gut reaction is that it is [NP-complete](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Np-complete); kind of a sick social version of the traveling salesman problem, maybe.  Or to make the obvious bad math/CS joke, it might be more appropos to use the [Clique problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_problem) as a analogy.

Have a nice day.