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
The Situation at the NSF
The National Science Foundation is one of the agencies most affected by the various executive orders issued by the Trump administration. As a critical funder of...
From Computational Complexity
The NSF From the Inside
The National Science Foundation is one of the agencies most affected by the various executive orders issued by the Trump administration. As a critical funder of...
From Computational Complexity
Lautemann's Beautiful Proof
In writing the drunken theorem post, I realized I never wrote a post on Lautemann's amazing proof that BPP is contained in \(\Sigma^p_2\), the second level of the...
From Computational Complexity
The Fighting Temeraire
What does an 1838 painting tell us about technological change?A colleague and I decided to see how well LLMs could teach us a topic we knew nothing about. We picked...
From Computational Complexity
"Our Days Are Numbered"
Slide in Lev Reyzin's JMM talk "Problems in AI and ML for Mathematicians" Reyzin is paraphrasing Telgarsky. Posted with permission. Last week I attended the Joint...
From Computational Complexity
My Drunken Theorem
Bill's SIGACT Open Problems Column remembering Luca Trevisan is out. I chose the problem of whether Promise-ZPP in P implies Promise-BPP in P, an extension of an...
From Computational Complexity
Complexity Year in Review
Back in the day (circa 1989) we studied locally random reductions which would lead to all those exciting interactive proof results. Somehow locally random reductions...
From Computational Complexity
Information is Physical?
I've heard a few times recently the phrase "Information only exists in a physical state". It come from the quantum computing world where they claim quantum changes...
From Computational Complexity
It's Time to Stop Using Grades
We use grades to evaluate students and motivate them to learn. That works as long as grades remain a reasonably good measure of how well the student understands...
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: The Complete List
Now in one place all of my sixty favorite theorems from the six decades of computational complexity (1965-2024).2015-2024 Graph Isomorphism (Babai) Sensitivity...
From Computational Complexity
We Will All Write Like AI
Will our writing all converge to a generic AI style? Let's take a quick detour into LaTeX. Back in the late '80s, before LaTeX was the standard, there was TeX—a...
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: Learning from Natural Proofs
October EditionI had a tough choice for my final favorite theorem from the decade 2015-2024. Runners up include Pseudodeterministic Primes and Hardness of Partial...
From Computational Complexity
Steven Rudich (1961-2024)
Complexity theorist Steven Rudich passed away on October 29 at the age of 63. His works on Natural Proofs and Program Obfuscation were both highly influential.great...
From Computational Complexity
Higher Education Under Trump
It feels eerie as pretty much everyone seemingly avoided talking about the election. But Trump back in the White House will likely have a profound effect on USonce...
From Computational Complexity
FOCS 2024
Junior/Senior lunch in 80°F Chicago Last summer I attended the Complexity Conference in Ann Arbor for the first time in eight years largely because it was within...
From Computational Complexity
Family Feud vs Pointless
Every now and then I feel like doing a Gasarchian post. This is one of those weeks. I'm going to look at the mathematics behind the American game show Family Feud...
From Computational Complexity
Computing and the Nobels
Herb Simon Herbert Simon while a political scientist in the 1940s at my institution, the Illinois Institute of Technology, developed the theory of bounded rationality...
From Computational Complexity
Fall Jobs Post 2024
In the fall, I write a jobs post predicting the upcoming CS faculty job market and giving suggestions and links. In the spring I used to crowdsource a list of where...
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: Gradient Descent
September EditionWho thought the algorithm behind machine learning would have cool complexity implications?The Complexity of Gradient Descent: CLS = PPAD ∩ PLSJohn...
From Computational Complexity