Communications of the ACM
Refine your search:
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 this leak information?
Here are four fictional stories though inspired by real world events or TV shows (I forget which is which). My question is, was a confidence broken or was some...
From Computational Complexity
Math lessons from the Donald Trump Nomination (non-political)
There may be articles titled Donald Trump and the Failure of Democracy. This is NOT one of them. This is about some math questions. I drew upon many sources but...
From Computational Complexity
Some more bits from the Gathering for Gardner
I posted about the Gathering for Gardner conference and about some of the talks I saw here. Today I continue with a few more talks. Playing Penney's game with...
From Computational Complexity
Some short bits from the Gathering for Gardner Conference
I attended G4G12 (Gathering for Gardner) a conference that meets every 2 years (though the gap between the first and second was three years) to celebrate the work...
From Computational Complexity
Its hard to tell if a problem is hard. Is this one hard?
Here is a problem I heard about at the Gathering for Gardner. Is it hard? easy? boring? interesting? I don't know. Let N={1,2,3,...} PROBLEM: parameters are s...
From Computational Complexity
What Rock Band Name would you choose?
I looked up my colleague Dave Mount on Wikipedia and found that he was a drummer for the glam rock band Mud. He informed me that (a) on Wikipedia he is David and...
From Computational Complexity
Are Perfect Numbers Bigger than Six initial sums of odd cubes (answered)
(NONE of this is my work. In fact some of it is on Wikipedia.) In my last blog I noticed that 28 = 13 + 33 496= 13 + 33 + 53 + 73 noting that 28 and 496 are...
From Computational Complexity
Are perfect numbers bigger than 6 initial sums of odd cubes?
I pose two questions today (Monday April 4). I will post the answers tomorrow (Tuesday April 5). Feel free to comment about the answers. If you don't want clues...
From Computational Complexity
Hillary Putnam passed away on March 13
Hillary Putnam passed away on March 13, 2016. Some of the obits say he was a philosopher, mathematician, logician, and computer scientist. He is probably best...
From Computational Complexity
On Phillip Rogaway's The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work.
Some people have emailed me asking me to blog about the paper The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work by Phillip Rogaway I urge you to read it, even if you disagree...
From Computational Complexity
When do we care about the constants?
I've been reading two books recently: Asymptopia by Joel Spencer (He turns 70 soon! Workshop for it!. My nephew things that celebrating your bday with a workshop...
From Computational Complexity
It works in practice, but does it work in theory (Pollard's Factorization algorithm)
Throughout this post I ignore polylog factors. It is trivial to factor N in time N1/2. Pollard's rho-algorithm (see my write up here or Wikipedia Entry) for...
From Computational Complexity
What is a `previous publication'?
Here are the guidelines about submission to STOC 2015 with regard to submitting a prior published paper. I assume that most of the Theory Conferences have a similar...
From Computational Complexity
∑{p≤ n} 1/p = ln(ln(n)) + o(1). read it here because....
(Last April fools day I posted four links to stories that seemed absurd and asked which one was false. They all were true. I recently came across five stories...
From Computational Complexity
Test of Time Award- a good idea but...
The ESA Conference (European Symposium on Algorithms) has a test-of-time award which recognizes outstanding papers in algorithms research that were published in...
From Computational Complexity
Math questions that come out of the Iowa Caucus
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2016/primary-caucus-results/iowa Jim Gilmore, republican, has 0% of the vote. Does that mean that literally NOBODY voted...
From Computational Complexity
When do we stop giving the original reference?
I was preparing a talk which included my result that there is a sane reduction 4-COL \le 3-COL (the paper is here) when I realized that if I am going to claim...
From Computational Complexity
Is it okay to praise an article or book in an article or book?
I recently had a paper accepted (YEAH!). The referees had some good corrections and one that puzzled me. you wrote ``our proof is similar to the one in the wonderful...
From Computational Complexity
A limit on the DFA-CFG divide for finite sets
It is easy to see that for Ln = {a,b}*a{a,b}2n There IS a CFG of size O(n) ANY DFA is of size double-exp-in-n I was wondering if we can increase this gap. That...
From Computational Complexity