How can I finish my algorithms research project in 3 weeks? So I'm doing a research project on a problem in graph theory and my conference deadline is just 3 weeks away. I need to develop a novel approximation algorithm for this problem and test it on synthetic data. I've already read a bunch of papers and have done a bunch of experiments to discover certain properties of graphs, but I haven't started writing the algorithm nor the paper. The good news is  Is it possible for me to do this in 3 weeks (assuming I work a total of ~200 hours)? A deadline extension is completely out of the question. The good news is that I have an expert professor mentoring me and he'll help make the paper more mathematically rigorous. Does anyone have some advice as for how I can finish this in 3 weeks? Thanks!
You won’t know if you can do it until you give it your very best shot. All we can say is that what you are asking about doing is very difficult. Some people might be able to cobble something together in 3 weeks. It won’t be as good as it might have been if they had, say, 3 months, but some rare very talented and hardworking people might produce something halfway decent.

Other people won’t come up with something good even in 3 months, or 3 years. It depends. We don’t know you, and we don’t know how hard this goal is.

I suggest that you give it your best effort. Even if you “fail” (in the narrow sense of not producing a minimum viable paper by the deadline), I believe it will be an educational and very rewarding experience to work extremely hard for the next few weeks in an attempt to meet this deadline. It will both advance your research substantially, which will yield some useful benefits in the future regardless of whether you meet this particular deadline, and teach you a lot about yourself and what you’re capable of. In my opinion, most people (especially younger, less established ones) use maybe 15% of their true intellectual capacity. Learning how to make the most of your potential is an incredibly important life skill that separates almost all successful people from everyone else, and trying to meet a crazy, impossible-looking deadline is a fantastic way to get on the path to acquiring this skill.

Finally, I don’t want to be guilty of giving you any more reasons to procrastinate by giving you long psychology blogs to read, but here is something that might give you a bit of hope/inspiration. Good luck!