A Silly Name, A Serious Game

Last night, a friend of mine pointed out a hilariously named CS article that had just popped up on the arxiv, notably "Simple Wriggling is Hard Unless You Are a Fat Hippo". Upon reading this title, I recalled SCIgen, the automatic CS paper generator (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen), and surely thought there must be a connection. But alas, there was none. Here it was: a paper with a silly name but a serious game.

The paper of interest actually involves a proof of the difficulty of finding an approximation of the shortest "thin" path between two points in a polygonal domain (i.e., that the problem is NP-hard). The title is a play on words, utilizing the connection between "thick" paths and "hippo"-dromes. Even the paper's chapter titles are cheeky, with gems such as "Snake Anatomy and Physiology" and "Being a Long Snake is Hard".

Motivated by this awkward title, I spent about a half hour in search of other serious papers with silly names. I, unfortunately, was vastly unsuccessful in this effort, but I did come across a number of notable silly papers. Of particular note are "Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken" by Dr. Doug Zongker of the University of Washington and "The Theory of Interstellar Trade" by Dr. Paul Krugman of Yale University. I was particular impressed with "Theory of Interstellar Trade" and the question it seeked to answer: "How should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel close to the speed at light?" In this 1978 paper, Dr. Krugman pointed out that such a question was quite valid with the then recent progress in the technology of space travel. However, with Mr. Obama's recently proposed NASA budget cuts, we may never see if Dr. Krugman's hypotheses regarding interstellar trade ring true.

UPDATE: I finally did the obvious thing of researching the conference where "Simple Wriggling" will be presented and came across a slew of talks with fun titles and serious messages (for the most part). Check out the program here.