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
Is DTIME(n) closed under concat? star? of course not but...
(STOC 2018 will offer child care for the first time. I was emailed the following and asked to pass it on: We are pleased to announce that we will provide pooled...
From Computational Complexity
Whan a deep theorem of your Uncles becomes standard should you be sad?
(An exposition of Nash-Williams's proof of the Kruskal Tree Theorem is here) Andrew Vazsonyi (the mathematician, see here, not the folklorist, see here for that...
From Computational Complexity
Challenge about NFA for {a^y : y\ne 1000} answered.
Recall that in a prior post I asked Is there an NFA for { ay : y ≠ 1000 } with substantially less than 1000 states. I will now show that any NFA for this set...
From Computational Complexity
Challenge: Is there a small NFA for { a^i : i\ne 1000} ?
Consider the language {L = ai : i ≠ 1000 } There is a DFA for L of size 1002 and one can prove that there is no smaller DFA. What about an NFA? Either: ...
From Computational Complexity
Why do we give citations? How should we give citations?
Why do we cite past work? There are many reasons and they lead to advice on how we should cite past work Give credit where credit it due. Some people over cite...
From Computational Complexity
Wanted: An Easy Proof of a Weak Theorem in NT so that I can get another VDW--> Primes infinite proof to be really easy.
(All math in this article is here) A while back I posted about a proof that Van Der Waerden's theorem implies the number of primes is infinite (see the post...
From Computational Complexity
When the Wrong People raise the issue
On my discrete math final in Spring 2017 I had a question: Prove that sqrt(2/3) is irrational. A student emailed me the folloing (I paraphrase and am prob not...
From Computational Complexity
When students are wrong but have a valid point, encourage them
I often have the class VOTE on a statement (the choices are usually TRUE/FALSE/UNKNOWN TO SCIENCE/Stewart-Colbert-2020) I ask the students who voted incorrectly...
From Computational Complexity
The web bad/People using it bad.
I was going to write a post about how hard it was to find what grades mean at different schools (e.g., at UMCP W (for withdraw) means the student dropped the course...
From Computational Complexity
A ``new'' ``application'' of Ramsey Theory/A Truly ``bad'' math song
Ian Parberry once told me (though I doubt he originated it- The first link I found says it was Mark Twain) to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
From Computational Complexity
"How can you use your research for ugrad projects?'- the wrong question
I was helping a math PhD who worked in computable ramsey theory prepare his teaching and research statements for his job application. One of the questions various...
From Computational Complexity
Publishing: Why Are We Doing It Right and Other Sciences Aren't?
(NOTE- this is NOT a `we hate Elsevier and the others' post- though I suspect the comments will be about that.) Alexandra Elbakyan has created a repository ofhere...
From Computational Complexity
How many degrees are in a Martian Year?
James Tanton gave a great talk at the JMM (Joint Math Meeting) in San Diego on how many degrees are in a Martian Year? but he didn't quite answer his title question...
From Computational Complexity
Donald Knuth Turns 80 years and 6 days
Celebrating Donald Knuth's 80th birthday, or 80 years + 7 days birthday seems odd. Should we use powers of 2? Hmm- too few, just 32 and 64 really. And having ahere...
From Computational Complexity
A new largest prime found!
A new largest KNOWN prime has been discovered and its 23 million digits long. Nate Silver's website had an article about it (written by Oliver Roeder) here An...
From Computational Complexity
Which of these Math acronyms are well known?
The last time I taught Grad Ramsey Theory there were very good math grads and ugrads in it. They used some acronyms - some I knew, some I didn't know (but knowthis...
From Computational Complexity
Monkey First!
The following story is not true nor has anyone claimed its true, but it has a point: A company gets a contract to do the following: train a monkey to sit on a ...
From Computational Complexity
Interesting Probability on a VERY OLD TV show
I have posted about things I see in TV or Movies that are math or CS related: Do TV shows overestimate how much a genius can help solve crimes or make really good...
From Computational Complexity
Fireside chat with Simons Inst Director Dick Karp
Fireside chat with Dick Karp Above link is Samir Khuller interviewing Dick Karp, though its labelled as a fireside chat with Dick Karp. Very interesting...
From Computational Complexity