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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.

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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.

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.

The Lawlessness of Large Numbers

July 7, 2023

Mathematicians can often figure out what happens as quantities grow infinitely large. What about when they are just a little big?

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.

Neural Networks Need Data to Learn. Even If It’s Fake.

June 16, 2023

Real data can be hard to get, so researchers are turning to synthetic data to train their artificial intelligence systems.

Sparse Networks Come to the Aid of Big Physics

June 8, 2023

A novel type of neural network is helping physicists with the daunting challenge of data analysis.

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