We design a linear time approximation scheme for the Gale-Berlekamp Switching Game and generalize it to a wider class of dense fragile minimization problems including the Nearest Codeword Problem (NCP) and Unique Games Problem. Further applications include, among other things, finding a constrained form of matrix rigidity and maximum likelihood ... more >>>

Suppose you ran a chess tournament, everybody played everybody, and you wanted to use the results to rank everybody. Unless you were really lucky, the results would not be acyclic, so you could not just sort the players by who beat whom. A natural objective is to find a ranking ... more >>>