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Computer Science

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Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking

September 5, 2023

Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms.

The AI Tools Making Images Look Better

August 23, 2023

Researchers have discovered ways around a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and beauty in digital images.

Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge

August 17, 2023

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster

August 11, 2023

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

Q&A

The Cryptographer Who Ensures We Can Trust Our Computers

July 27, 2023

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure our digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

To Move Fast, Quantum Maze Solvers Must Forget the Past

July 20, 2023

Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the path they took. A new result suggests that the trade-off may be inevitable.

Mathematicians Solve Long-Standing Coloring Problem

July 19, 2023

A new result shows how much of the plane can be colored by points that are never exactly one unit apart.

How to Build a Big Prime Number

July 13, 2023

A new algorithm brings together the advantages of randomness and deterministic processes to reliably construct large prime numbers.

Computer Scientists Inch Closer to Major Algorithmic Goal

June 23, 2023

A new paper finds a faster method for determining when two mathematical groups are the same.

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