Although the goal is simple, Dr. King calls the experiment “ugly” because the rich system has an overabundance of factors at play. “This makes the problem not easily amenable to elegant theory or simple analysis,” he said. Dr. King has been pursuing this line of investigation for several years. As research problems go, it’s a bird’s nest of a bird’s nest: All the input parameters and boundary conditions are interwoven, in ways that prove difficult to tease apart. More than a metaphorThe paper recently published by Dr. King and his collaborators primarily reviews the field of nest research, such as it is.

Source: New York Times March 17, 2020 06:22 UTC