Information processing researchers don't like quantum field theory? (update)
It has now been officially confirmed. Information processing researchers don't like quantum field theory. My paper Discrete network dynamics. Part 1: Operator theory (which can be found in arXiv at cs.NE/0511027) has been rejected by the Journal of Machine Learning Research. I presume that I should not quote verbatim from the rejection letter. However, the gist of the reasons for rejection were based on reports from two reviewers:
- The need to include more citations to related work. [This is entirely reasonable. I had overlooked some prior work that didn't use the right key words to be caught by my literature search.]
- The need to include a proof of the convergence to the correct joint PDF when multiple iterations of the update operator were used. [I had already proved that a single iteration of the update operator was exactly equivalent to a standard MCMC update, and we already know the convergence properties after multiple iterations of a standard MCMC update, so I don't actually need to provide any proof. There is nothing new to prove!]
- The need to supply explicit examples of MCMC algorithms generated by use of this approach. [The whole section on ACEnet is such an example. I could supply more examples, but the paper is already quite long, and I intend to publish these in future papers in the series.]
The paper was also sent to a third reviewer who gave an "informal" report which included the statement that my creation and annihilation operators were curious because they anti-commuted. This is news to me, so I invite anyone to point out where I use anti-commuting operators in my paper.
I am disappointed that my paper should be unconditionally rejected. However, it was not a complete surprise to me (see the title of this posting), so I am not even angry about it. The net effect is that there is now a blockage in the way of all subsequent papers in the DND series, where I investigate various consequences of this approach. Never mind, what I do in this sort of circumstance is to dump a highly abbreviated (and thus incomprehensible) version of the paper on an unsuspecting conference somewhere, where it can languish in their proceedings to be read only by the most inquisitive researchers.
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