John Tromp


Currently residing in Long Island, New York. john.tromp@gmail.com

Research Interests

Board Games and Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, Complexity, Algorithmic Information Theory, Distributed Computing, Computational biology, and what not. My recent research has focused on the Combinatorics of Go, specifically counting the number of legal positions. I've been playing with a Lambda Calculus based utterly simple computer model. My Erdös number is 2, courtesy of Jeffrey Shallit, my favourite CS lecturer, who coauthored papers with both me and Erdös. A while ago I studied the complexity of OriMazes.

Recreational Interests

I guess I'm sort of addicted to the game of Go. Having learned the game at the age of 24, I've now reached the rank of 2 dan, hoping to one day make it to 3 dan. My personal Go page discusses logical rules and provides some tutorials. Chess used to be my favourite game, and I can still occasionally be tempted to play some blitz chess. A nice game of Risk can be quite enjoyable too, although it's a little difficult to find 2 or 3 playing partners.

When I was still a PhD student, under the supervision of Paul Vitányi, I thought of doing a thesis on the game of connect-4. Instead, I ended up working on distributed computing problems, and many other topics in my PhD research, which resulted in this thesis.

Since the early 90s, I've been fascinated by recumbent bikes. Check out this picture of a Green Machine, a design concept that in 2005 has finally been revived in a slightly different form. Since 2000, I am the proud owner of an Optima Condor. and got myself listed on Nederlandse Ligfietser Thuispagina's.

Weather permitting (which is rare in Holland), I love to go inline skating on my Salomon TR Racing.

Here's a picture of the 13 story apartment building, that I lived in '98-'06. (Not quite as tall as the Burj Dubai:-) It's right next to the Flevopark, as can be seen on all these maps: www.multimap.com, maps.google.com.

I like to think of cute algorithms (or take other peoples') and write them in the absolute minimum amount of code, greatly obfuscating them in the process. See my programming pearls.

See my CD collection to get an idea of my taste in music.

A random collection of WWW-links

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