HN Explorer

If you had 5 months of time to experiment/research something, what would you do?

4 points by thesisist ↗ HN
... in terms of technological concepts, not so much business ideas.

Background: I am CS Master in search of a subject for my thesis. The problem with the propositions I come up with is that I think in business ideas (similar to those http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190974) for useful purposes which (understandably) do not suffice the academic/scientific requirements. However, my department is not really offering any alternatives leaving me in an unfortunate position.

With all the creative and innovative minds present here at HN, I would like to ask: If you could write another thesis, what would you cover today? It would also be helpful if you would share what you wrote about previously. And of course, if your former department publishes their thesis offers publicly, links to that would also be appreciated for inspirational purposes. Thanks.

5 comments

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josefresco
For me the business ideas lay the groundwork for future technological exploration and experimentation. If I had 5 months I'd crank out a few profitable websites and then use those funds to bankroll my future endeavors. What those are exactly .. I can't say and that may be part of my problem. Waiting for financial stability to pursue my passions (but I digress)
jodrellblank
Waiting for Godot more like. Are you comfortable with the idea that you might never get financial stability and might live the rest of your life and then die, having never pursued your passions?
ig1
1) I'd develop a theory of board games based upon game graphs. I think there's huge potential in the area, enough to even change the way we think about games. When viewing games as graphs you can start doing interesting things like enumerate all games that can be described in N nodes, find isomorphisms between game sub-graphs, and create a mathematically measurable concept of "difficulty".

or

2) The application of cryptography to anonymous financial trading. At the moment a lot of anonymous trading happens via "dark pools" which are third party providers that match up anonymous counterparties, however this is less than ideal because you have to have a trusted third party and it also introduces latency issues.

maxwin
Go to your molecular biology department. Talk to them about what research they're doing and what kind of data they're getting. There should be a lot of publishable thesis you can find (either building a new bioinformatics tool or figure out new algorithms to make sense of their data).
Aegean
What do you like in CS? Web? Computer Architecture? It has to be something you're interested in and you don't give a clue on that.