Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Computational Complexity
Offer Timing
In most academic fields, departments, either formally or informally, have their interviews and make their junior faculty offers at about the same time. Facultytackled...
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems 2015-2024
In 1994, the FST&TCS conference invited me to give a talk at their meeting in Madras (now Chennai). I was in my tenth year as a complexity theorists since I started...
From Computational Complexity
2023 Complexity Year in Review
Result of the year goes to Polynomial-Time Pseudodeterministic Construction of PrimesLijie Chen, Zhenjian Lu, Igor C. Oliveira, Hanlin Ren and Rahul SanthanamAn...
From Computational Complexity
Respect
I've generally avoided talking about all the events at college campuses in the last few months that came to a head at the congressional hearings last week that...
From Computational Complexity
Do We Need to Formalize?
Back in the 1990s I explored the system Nuprl for formalizing mathematical proofs. We had a theoretical paper on quickly checking a proof and I wanted to see if...
From Computational Complexity
The Engineer and The Computer Scientist
What is the difference between engineering and computer science? CS is not an engineering field, though there is some overlap. It's not the digital versus physical...
From Computational Complexity
War Games
With the self-destruction of OpenAI well underway, Friday night I watched the movie War Games for the first time since the 80s. Quick synopsis (spoilers): NORAD...
From Computational Complexity
Inverting a Function
With the STOC deadline this last Monday, a number of complexity papers have appeared on arXiV and ECCC. Two caught my eye because they seem to independently prove...
From Computational Complexity
Othello. Solved.
The perfect game Back in the 1980s, a high school friend and I created Excalibur, a computer othello program that I've posted about before. Even on an OG IBMannounced...
From Computational Complexity
The Loop Graph
Locals refer to downtown Chicago as "The Loop" because of a rectangle of elevated (or "El") train tracks that create a loop through the area first built in An...
From Computational Complexity
Saving Grace
The Grace Hopper Conference has grown to one of the largest in computer science, pushing past 25,000 attendees. Most women in computing, whether a student, faculty...
From Computational Complexity
Fall Jobs Post 2023
In the 2022 Fall Jobs Post I talked about the effect of generative AI and that was two weeks before Open AI released ChatGPT to the public. A year later, how will...
From Computational Complexity
Measuring Quantum Progress
In August the Google Quantum AI Team posted a blog post How to compare a noisy quantum processor to a classical computer to measure progress in building quantum...
From Computational Complexity
The Lyadov Lesson
I've seen many brilliant students, those who flew though high school and undergrad with great grades and little effort. As PhD students, they often feel they still...
From Computational Complexity
Half-Exponential No More
I've mentioned Kannan's proof that \(\Sigma_2^p\) does not have \(n^2\) size-circuits before. A similar proof shows that \(\Sigma_2^E = \mathrm{NTIME}^\mathrm{NP}...
From Computational Complexity
We Must Be Doing Something Right
The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial Monday that started What’s the best four-year college in Illinois? Not the University of Chicago, Northwestern University or...
From Computational Complexity
Mr. Jaeger and The Scroll
There were three major influencers in my educational journey: Mike Sipser, my PhD advisor at Berkeley and MIT, Juris Hartmanis who founded the field of computational...
From Computational Complexity
Books to Inspire Math
Two of my colleagues and co-authors from my early days at the University of Chicago have released books over the past few months designed to excite people withMathematical...
From Computational Complexity
What Makes a Constructive Proof?
In this weblog, we've used constructive in different ways. Often we talk about constructive as something we can create in polynomial time, like an expander. But...
From Computational Complexity