Quote of the Day

Today's quote comes from an anonymous referee who wrote the tie-breaking referee report that caused a paper of mine to be accepted for publication:

While this manuscript is not a perfect or complete solution to the problem of community detection in networks...

You know, it's a good thing that such a perfect or complete solution of the problem of community detection (some formulations of which have been proven to NP complete --- that is, with an appropriate definition of community based on optimizing a particular class of quantities) isn't what's expected for publication. If so, I'd have only one answer: Good luck with that.

Anyway, the referee was perfectly fair and is completely correct with the implied comment that our paper doesn't blow the problem wide open but rather just makes a specific set of interesting contributions, but I was nevetheless somewhat amused by the use of that phrasing. Perhaps that comment was simply for the benefit of the editor who works in another research area? Presumably so, but I was amused nonetheless, and I wanted to share my amusement.