[nostrademons]

If by "fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm", you mean something like discovering Floyd-Warshall, then yes. I'd rather be programming Tetris in Obj-C. Floyd-Warshall, while cool, wouldn't be recognized by 99.9999% of the people out there, while iPhone Tetris would be used by millions. More to the point, if you hack up iPhone Tetris, you have a game that you can play, while if you invent Floyd-Warshall, you have a graph algorithm that you can...er, it's bound to be useful sometime. Plus it takes maybe a day or two to hack up Tetris, while it takes several years to do basic CS research.

This is why I'm not an academic.

I can respect basic CS research without wanting to do it myself. I use the fruits of it all the time. But when faced with a problem, I'd rather hack up something that's good enough to get something on the screen than spend the time necessary to cross all the Ts and dot the Is for a publishable paper. To me, the code and what you can do with it speaks for itself.

[tensor]

I would guess that Floyd-Warshall has affected far more people than Tetris has, despite the fact that most people do not recognize it. Personally, I would rather have a positive impact on the world than simply be recognized. Hundreds of years in the future, Floyd-Warshall will still be used.

Will Tetris be used? Maybe. But it is a game. It is not solving real problems. Famous people today being recognized far in the futre? Even less likely.

[mturmon]

With all respect, people should be doing things they're drawn to. When you're about to retire, if you didn't enjoy the ride, you probably chose wrong, even if you were Floyd or Warshall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

[endtime]

>I can respect basic CS research without wanting to do it myself.

Sure. Likewise. I don't plan on doing a PhD. I was primarly responding to the lack of respect for CS research:

>Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.