Integration -- was: Re: [Coin-standards] minutes / strategy

[Leonardo B. Lopes]

> >I think vendors benefit if we accept the argument that having a better
> >standard makes it easier to develop better, modular, modeling tools,
> >and/or the argument that a new standard helps research.
> 
> So the benefit could be long term.  I might be willing to accept that.

Excellent. That is all I'm trying to argue anyway. The standard allows
certain practice-oriented experiments to be attempted at low cost. If it
costs too much to run these experiments, commercial outfits won't run
them, and academic folks will turn to other directions for research
papers. If it is cheap enough to run the experiments, more of them will
take place, and a few of them every so often will actually become
practical in a commercial sense, a.s.

> 
> >  What that
> >ultimately does (maybe not this fiscal quarter) is make optimization more
> >accessible and more prevalent, consequently creating opportunities for new
> >revenue streams in places where there weren't any.
> 
> I think this last sentence is a stretch.
> 

It is certainly a stretch, in the sense that each implication is only true
in probability. But making optimization easier to use would create new
revenue streams. Making life easier for developers would end up making
optimization easier for modelers. And a good standard would make life
easier for developers. In probability, of course.

The thing is, IMHO, that when you multiply the probability of the scenario
in which all the implications come to fruition with the payoff for that
scenario, you get a lot more than the cost of developing the standard.
Plus, the other scenarios also have non-negative payoffs. 

The worse that can happen is that the standard ends up untouched in some
journal, and that Ph.D. students don't waste any more time writing MPS
parsers. Even in that case, it doesn't eliminate any previous options. As
some people said in Miami, MPS and SMPS aren't going away. I've actually
argued before and still believe that this project does not eliminate the
need for an MPS revision, as lobbied for by other commercial people in
Miami, or Gassmann's SMPS revision. Both will still have their place, and
in fact they both feed from each other.

========================================================================
Leonardo B. Lopes                                       leo at iems.nwu.edu 
Ph.D. Student                                              (847)491-8470
IEMS - Northwestern University              http://www.iems.nwu.edu/~leo