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
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
Transcripts for the 21st Century
When I start a new academic job, I need to prove that I actually have a PhD. I have to log in my MIT alumni page, pay my $10 and they email my graduate transcript...
From Computational Complexity
Turning Sixty
I turn sixty today, spending my birthday reviewing a computer science department in Asia. Sixty is a good time to look back and reflect in a rambling way.I started...
From Computational Complexity
The Acting Professor
When I taught Programming for Engineers at Northwestern in 2008, the textbook gave access to PowerPoint slides I could use to teach the class. Since C++ is notseries...
From Computational Complexity
The College Visits
My wife's cousin and her daughter came and visited Chicago. The daughter, between junior and senior year of high school, is on the tail end of college tour season...
From Computational Complexity
Paper Writing Before Overleaf
A twitter question from a young researcher. Wait, how do paper writing collaborations work with LaTeX that doesn’t use overleaf? You need more than a .Tex file...
From Computational Complexity
More on Psuedodeterminism
Back in May I posted about a paper that finds primes pseudodeterministically and Quanta magazine recently published a story on the result. Oddly enough the paper...
From Computational Complexity