The comments on my previous post, on recent AI breakthroughs in solving Erdös problems and beyond, must’ve set some sort of record for the number of separate reasons commenters offered me to despair about the […]
Tag: scottaaronson
As most readers have presumably heard by now, Paul Erdös’s Unit Distance Problem from 1946—one of the central open problems from the field of discrete geometry—has been solved by an internal OpenAI model. Erdös had […]
Over the years, I’ve written two op-eds for The New York Times about quantum computing, at the NYT editors’ invitation: Quantum Computing Promises New Insights, Not Supermachines (2011) Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters (2019) […]
WHOA … I’ve won the inaugural Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work in Theoretical Computer Science! This has a particular meaning for me as someone who knew Luca Trevisan as well as I did for […]
Holy crap … yesterday I was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences! If you don’t believe me, click the link and keep scrolling down until you hit the name “Aaronson.” But then continue […]
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (1934-2026) won the 1980 Turing Award for numerous contributions to computer science, including foundational work on concurrency and formal verification and the invention (with Dijkstra) of the dining philosophers problem. […]
Imagine that every week for twenty years, people message you asking you to comment on the latest wolf sighting, and every week you have to tell them: I haven’t seen a wolf, I haven’t heard […]
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum fault-tolerance with lower overhead than was previously […]
Yesterday Dana, the kids, and I went to the theater to watch The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist, the well-reviewed new documentary about whether AGI will destroy the world. This was surely […]
Last summer, I was privileged to teach a two-week course on theoretical computer science to exceptional 11- and 12-year-olds at Epsilon Camp, held at Washington University in St. Louis. I was at Epsilon Camp to […]
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