Scott’s foreword: I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant colleagues, Pravesh Kothari, Raghu Meka, and Prasad Raghavendra, for sharing the guest post below about how theoretical computer sc...
Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, man...
Note: Of course I’ve been glued all week to the dramatic developments in AI. I’m working on a post about them. I’m not good at reacting to things in a timely way. So today, I’l...
I woke up yesterday with the following thoughts, which are probably either obvious or dumb. A central thesis that many readers, including me, took from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach when youn...
So yeah, Anthropic has announced that it’s now watermarking the outputs of Claude, using a scheme based on Google’s SynthID, which is in turn based on the Gumbel Softmax scheme that I prop...
What’s about the only thing more badass than a 17-year-old winning a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI)? That 17-year-old intentionally forfeiting his gold medal by wearing...
Friend-of-the-blog (well, mainly just friend) Adi Akavia has asked me to publicize that she’s helping to organize an exciting CS conference called Mind-IL at Tel Aviv University on October 26, i...
Whatever you’ve been writing to me to ask if I’m aware of: yeah, I’m aware of it. In particular: Anyway, about the AI stuff. I don’t know whether this is literally our last yea...
A week ago, a philosopher named Amit Hagar put out a preprint entitled The NISQ Trap: Eight Years of Demonstrations the Hardware was Built to Lose. Here’s the abstract: With a single clear excep...
Here at the National Academy of Sciences, it seems that my first job is to serve on the selection committee for the prestigious Michael and Sheila Held Prize in combinatorial and discrete optimization...