Had this same exact thought as an undergrad like 3 years ago! I kinda gave up due to the massive barrier and difficult financial burdens faced by phd students. This feels nice to know i wasn't crazy.
> All experi-ments use a single thread on a Macbook Pro with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4960HQ processor. Unless stated otherwise, all timing results use five trials, with each trial reporting the fastest among 20 executions.
It may also be worth nothing that, even as a hobby, one can actually do a lot with modern hardware if you scope your project well. There is also a lot of free resources such as CoLab available to those who have very limited computing power at home/work.
Last but not least, there is also nothing stopping you from announcing your results on arXiv and, if you can be bothered (as a hobbyist), get it published in a peer-reviewed journal.
So if you still have ideas, I encourage you to go ahead and try them! :)
"I would have done this years ago if I knew how to do it" is fantastically narcissistic.
If you roll everything, financial incentives, emotional readiness, support and preparation, etc, into 'opportunity' then yeah, I believe it.
I genuinely don't understand why we allow papers to be published on computer science, with graphs plotted of the supposed efficacy of research (i.e. not just a theoretical paper), with no code attached.
To assess MADDNESS’s effectiveness, we implemented both it and existing algorithms in C++ and Python. All of our code and raw numerical results are publicly available at https://smarturl.it/Maddness. All experiments use a single thread on a Macbook Pro with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4960HQ processor.
edit: the url above redirects to: https://github.com/dblalock/bolt
Theory has its place, and so does systems work. No need to denigrate one or the other.
If we can't reproduce it isn't really science. I know academics often write bad code and don't like to publish their dirty work, but the buck has to stop somewhere.