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
Does the university matter?
As we come out of a pandemic with online teaching and research collaborations, how much do we actually need the university?Theoretical research in computer science...
From Computational Complexity
Emerging from the Pandemic
The City of Chicago yesterday agreed with the latest CDC guidelines that those of us fully vaccinated no longer have to wear masks in most settings. Lollapalooza...
From Computational Complexity
Cryptocurrency, Blockchains and NFTs
I first wrote about bitcoin in this blog ten years ago after I gave a lecture in a cryptography class I taught at Northwestern. Two years later I had a follow-up...
From Computational Complexity
Negotiations
So you got an offer to be an assistant professor in the computer science department at Prestigious U. Congratulations! Time to negotiate your offer with the chair...
From Computational Complexity
The Million Dollar Sermon
Illinois Tech has one of the greatest origin stories for a university. In 1890 Frank Gunsaulus, a pastor on the south side of Chicago, gave a sermon where he said...
From Computational Complexity
Ordering Beauty
First, congratulations to fellow complexity theorist and blogger Scott Aaronson for receiving the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing for "groundbreaking contributionsMaradona...
From Computational Complexity
Quantum Stories
Scott Aaronson wrote last month about the hype over quantum computing. I'd thought I'd drop a few stories.I was once asked to review a grant proposal (outside the...
From Computational Complexity
Want to Buy a Theorem?
This is embarrassing to admit but after a few badly timed trades on GameStop options I find myself a bit tight on money. To raise some cash, I reluctantly decided...
From Computational Complexity
Slicing the Hypercube
Here's a neat result I heard about at virtual Dagstuhl last week, a new lower bound on the number of hyperplanes that cuts all the edges of a hypercube.A n-dimensional...
From Computational Complexity
I read the news today oh boy
I'm absolutely elated that Lázló Lovász and Avi Wigderson won the Abel Prize. More from the New York Times, Quanta Magazine and Gil Kalai. Another example ofspa...
From Computational Complexity
Cake Cutting in Overtime
There's a new proposal out of Baltimore for a new way to handle overtime in National Football League games. This post is about American Football, soccer has its...
From Computational Complexity
Complexity is the Enemy of Speed
The title of this post came from an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on vaccine distribution. Many attempts to get the vaccines to the right groups...
From Computational Complexity
A Blood Donation Puzzle
In the US you can donate whole blood every eight weeks. Suppose Elvira does exactly that. Will she hit every date of the year? For example, if Elvira gave blood...
From Computational Complexity
PhDs and Green Cards
Joe Biden's immigration policy has some interesting policies for PhDs. Biden will exempt from any cap recent graduates of PhD programs in STEM fields in the U.S...
From Computational Complexity
Alan Selman (1941-2021)
From a 1994 Dagstuhl Workshop. Selman is the one wearing a cap. Alan Selman, one of the early leaders in structural complexity and the co-founder and first chair...
From Computational Complexity
The Ethics Board
Back in 2014 I recommended a TCS ethics board mainly to deal with plagiarism and who should get credit for a result. It went the way of most suggestions I makeasked...
From Computational Complexity
Complexity Year in Review 2020
For the result of the year we go to all they way back to the "before times". MIP*=RE by Zhengfeng Ji, Anand Natarajan, Thomas Vidick, John Wright and Henry YuenA...
From Computational Complexity
Slowest Sorting Algorithms
Radu Gigore tweeted "People are obsessed with finding the best algorithms. What about the worst?" So here's a Christmas gift that keeps giving, the slowest of sorting...
From Computational Complexity
Optiland
Many of you have heard of Russell Impagliazzo's five worlds from his 1995 classic A personal view of average-case complexity In short Algorithmica: P = NP orHeuristica...
From Computational Complexity