Is Greed Good? A Catholic Perspective on Modern Usury

Efficient Pythagorean trees: Greed is good

The Pythagorean tree is a fractal figure with a branching structure based upon the Pythagorean theorem. This paper describes the use of a greedy algorithm to encourage a homogenous spread of detail for asymmetrical trees and avoid localized regions of high detail. A model of prioritized branch growth based on this idea is used to optimize tree shape, allowing more visually interesting trees to ...

Greed Is Good: Near-Optimal Submodular Maximization via Greedy Optimization

It is known that greedy methods perform well for maximizing monotone submodular functions. At the same time, such methods perform poorly in the face of non-monotonicity. In this paper, we show—arguably, surprisingly—that invoking the classical greedy algorithm O( √ k)-times leads to the (currently) fastest deterministic algorithm, called REPEATEDGREEDY, for maximizing a general submodular funct...

Surrogacy: a Catholic perspective.

Greed is Good for Deterministic Scale-Free Networks

Large real-world networks typically follow a power-law degree distribution. To study such networks, numerous random graph models have been proposed. However, real-world networks are not drawn at random. In fact, the behavior of real-world networks and random graph models can be the complete opposite of one another, depending on the considered property. Brach, Cygan, Lacki, and Sankowski [SODA 2...

Greed is Good if Randomized: New Inference for Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing with high-order features results in a provably hard decoding problem. A lot of work has gone into developing powerful optimization methods for solving these combinatorial problems. In contrast, we explore, analyze, and demonstrate that a substantially simpler randomized greedy inference algorithm already suffices for near optimal parsing: a) we analytically quantify the numbe...