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
Wassily Hoeffding 1914-1991
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Wassily Hoeffding today, let's recall his incredibly useful inequality. Prob(|X-pn|>εn) < 2e-2ε2n where...
From Computational Complexity
STOC 2014
At the just completed STOC conference I received the 2014 SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize. Part of this citation reads"His blog, and many others that followed...
From Computational Complexity
Forgotten but not Lost in a Mapless World
Massimo Vignelli passed away on Tuesday, a visionary designer known for many things in particularly the 1970s NYC Subway Map. I used to pour over this map assteering...
From Computational Complexity
Theory Jobs 2014
In the fall we list theory jobs, in the spring we see who got them. Similar to last year, I created a fully editable Google Spreadsheet to crowd source who is going...
From Computational Complexity
Losing the Middle
In the 70's growing up, to listen to music I had a turntable for vinyl records. The quality of music went up almost continuously with the amount you were willing...
From Computational Complexity
1984 + 30
Back in 7th grade we had some discussion in history class long since forgotten but was ended by the statement "Remember, 1984 is only eight years away". While the...
From Computational Complexity
(IEEE) Conference on Computational Complexity
The 29th IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity will be held in Vancouver June 11-13. Student travel award deadline is TOMORROW Monday May 5th, early registration...
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: Equilibrium
The past decade has seen an explosion of work tying together theoretical computer science and micro-economics. Much has come in the area of market design, where...
From Computational Complexity
Libraries Without Books
Georgia Tech in its library renovation will move the vast majority of its books into a combined Emory/Tech Library Service Center off-campus. Very few people use...
From Computational Complexity
Announcements
Time for a short rundown of announcements. STOC will be held May 31-June 3 in New York City. Early registration and hotel deadline is April 30. Student travel...
From Computational Complexity
Should you reveal a P = NP algorithm?
A reader asks What would you do if you could prove that P=NP with a time-complexity of n2 or better... moreover, would you publish it? There are all theseheartbleed...
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: Extended Formulations
The first couple of favorite theorems took place at the beginning of the last decade, but recent years have brought exciting results as well, such as the limitations...
From Computational Complexity
I am Bill Gasarch
I have a confession to make. Remember back in 2007 when I retired from the blog for about a year. I didn't actually retire at all but instead took the blog innew...
From Computational Complexity
Should We Have a TCS Ethics Board?
We sometimes hear of the (rare) scientist who fakes data or results of experiments. In theoretical computer science one cannot fake a theorem, particularly an important...
From Computational Complexity
Spring Breaking at Dagstuhl
It's spring break at Georgia Tech and time to head to Germany for the Dagstuhl Seminar Computational Complexity of Discrete Problems. Lots of discussion on...
From Computational Complexity
Cosmos from Generation to Generation
During high school, well before the world-wide web with its bloggers and YouTube, out came a series Cosmos that I watched religiously. Back then you had to watch...
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: Unique Games
Michel Goemans and David Williamson made a splash in the 90's using semidefinite programming to give a new approximation algorithm for the max-cut problem, a ratio...
From Computational Complexity
Why Become a Professor
Someone took me to task because in November I posted that the CRA News had 50 pages of job ads but didn't note that very few of those ads specifically were searching...
From Computational Complexity
Analog Adventures
I was 11 forty years ago when Dungeons and Dragons first appeared and by high school many of my friends spent far too many hours embarking on those fantasy adventures...
From Computational Complexity