FOCS Test of Time Awards
David Zuckerman holds an Endowed Professorship in the Texas Computer Science department.
He wrote to some of us about the 2023 FOCS Test of Time Awards. Note that we just posted about the corresponding STOC awards. The rules are the same.
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Independence Day 2046?
Plus backfeed on AI articles in today’s New York Times
Will Smith may still be spry when we need him again. His first Oscar-worthy punch took out an alien in the 1996 movie Independence Day. In the 2004 movie I, Robot he fended off an AI incursion by the same means:
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| Still from source |
Today we propose our own dystopian movie script but then continue our discussion of how seriously close to reality this all may be.
A New AKS
An award for attacking an NP-hard problem
Miklós Ajtai, Ravi Kumar, and D. Sivakumar were among winners of the ACM STOC 2023 “Test of Time” Awards. The award recognized their joint paper from STOC 2001 titled, “A sieve algorithm for the shortest lattice vector problem.”
Today we congratulate them and the other winners.
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AI Ends It All
I was getting a lift with a friend—Greg Skau—just the other day. No not in his boat, but in his car.
Our conversation turned to the topic of: “is AI a threat to all of us?” Indeed. See this:
The year is 2050. The location is London— but not as we know it. GodBot, a robot so intelligent it can out-smart any human, is in charge of the United Kingdom — the entire planet, in fact — and just announced its latest plan to reverse global temperature rises: an international zero-child, zero-reproduction policy, which will see all human females systematically destroyed and replaced with carbon-neutral sex robots.
That my friend Greg would raise questions about AI seemed pretty neat. It seemed natural yet quite cool that a friend—who was not an AI expert—would raise these issues. I am also not an AI expert—not even an advanced beginner. But it is on just about everyone’s top list of questions. We had a fun conversation, but failed to resolve the issue. Of course.
A Hidden Heroine
William Friedman was famous as one who broke codes during both world wars. I knew about him from articles such as this.
But wait 
What is so interesting is that I was unaware of her great contributions. I thought I knew the history of code breaking. But I was totally wrong. Elizebeth Friedman’s work on decrypting coded radio messages helped tip the balances of WWI and WWII. She saved thousands of lives, but her work was hidden by the US government for 62 years. Her superiors—all men—took credit for her work. She initially got none. Nothing at all.
This is—at least it was—one of the terrible injustices in the history of code breaking.
Computer Science Marches On
With a note on the death of someone who tried to stop it
Arnold the Allosaurus is moving to new digs. All during my time at Princeton, he held sway in cavernous Guyot Hall, the home of several earth and environmental science departments. Thanks to a huge gift from alumnus Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, Guyot Hall will be rebuilt and expanded as the new home for the Department of Computer Science and several affiliated centers.
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| Tongue-in-cheek source |
Arnold will travel to the new Environmental Studies and Schools of Engineering and Applied Sciences complex being built along Ivy Lane. The Guyot name will travel with him.
A Little Noise Makes Quantum Factoring Fail
Human Extinction?
And some counter-arguments
Hava Siegelmann is the Provost Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at U.Mass. Amherst. She returned in 2019 from serving as a DARPA Program Director. Her work at DARPA included leading two AI initiatives: L2M for “Lifelong Learning Machines” and GARD for “Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception.”
Today we discuss whether we need measures to guarantee human robustness against AI.
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Topping the Hat
An “einstein” that doesn’t need flipping
Siobhan Roberts is a Canadian science journalist, biographer, and historian of mathematics. She has an article that appeared in print in yesterday’s New York Times. It is on a second breakthrough by a team of mathematicians, improving their solution to a famous problem on tiling as we covered last March.
Yesterday, while reading the Times, I must admit that I was surprised. I was reading Section A, with tons of stuff on the war in Ukraine and the debt ceiling deal and on the Republican primaries for president. I was not expecting to see a math theorem given such prominence.
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Combinatorics or Logic?
Or is it number theory?
Julius Büchi was a Swiss mathematician who taught at Purdue University for many years. His is arguably a case of influence—in multiple fields—far exceeding a modest number of publications. A number of those, both at DBLP and his collected works, came after his untimely passing in 1984. His influence in logic was furthered by his association with Saunders Mac Lane; in computer science, through his PhD student Lawrence Landweber and a group of computer science logicians that included Paul Young.
Today we talk about a new book by Jeffrey Shallit that may extend this influence further.
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