Computer Science Theory

 A listing:

https://rjlipton.wpcomstaging.com/2022/01/26/a-list-of-most-theory-blogs/

A Little Weekend Reading (via Stephen Wolfram)

  Stephen Wolfram continues with his computational paradigm:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/09/even-beyond-physics-introducing-multicomputation-as-a-fourth-general-paradigm-for-theoretical-science/

Podcast With Donald Knuth

 Wow, 2+ hours of Donald Knuth talking with Lex Fridman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE1R8FYUJm0

Models and Monte Carlo

 This weekend you can either breeze your way through Tolstoy's "War and Peace" or slowly work your way through the latest from Brian Hayes ;))

http://bit-player.org/2021/three-months-in-monte-carlo

Quantum Computing Primer

 Who better than Scott Aaronson to explain a bit about quantum computing to you:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-quantum-computing-so-hard-to-explain-20210608/

Collatz Conjecture... perhaps a new approach

 For any in the mood for some heavier reading here's "An Automated Approach To the Collatz Conjecture" newly out from Scott Aaronson et.al.:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.14697.pdf

'...the End of Days'

If you’re already having a bad day, maybe don’t go read this right away!:

http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2016/08/mathematics-and-end-of-days.html

Keith Devlin reviews and comments on a new documentary titled “Zero Days” about the “Stuxnet” computer virus hatched by the U.S. and Israel to destroy centrifuges involved in the Iranian nuclear production program. Devlin calls the film “arguably the most important movie of the present century” and titles his piece “Mathematics and the End of Days,” which may give you a hint as to its thrust (Variety calls it "a white knuckle thriller"). But in case you want stronger indication, here are some sentences near the end of Keith's piece:

“The weapon is, after all, just a mathematical structure; a piece of code. Designing it is a mathematical problem. Unlike a nuclear bomb, the mathematician does not have to hand over her results to a large, well-funded organization to build the weapon. She can create it herself at a keyboard.
"That raw power has been the nature of mathematics since our ancestors first began to develop the subject several thousand years ago. Those of us in the mathematics profession have always known that. It seems we have now arrived at a point where that power has reached a new level, certainly no less awesome than nuclear weapons.”

I hadn’t even heard of this film prior to Dr. Devlin's piece, but now am certainly anxious to see it. An old Murphy-like aphorism says that ‘anything that can happen will eventually happen’ -- in this day of computer malware and cyber-warfare that’s never been a scarier thought.

Here is the official trailer for this must-see film:

"You're living in a computer simulation..."

Not a new idea, but a fun one...:

http://io9.com/#!5799396

(...How can we know "reality")

What Next From IBM?

RJ Lipton's commentary stemming from the recent win by IBM's "Watson" computer in the recent "Jeopardy" face-off:

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/are-mathematicians-in-jeopardy/

...in which Lipton essentially asks whether the invention of an expert trivial-pursuit robot is a step toward the creation of an expert robot mathematician.

Caltech TED Talk

Here a talk by computer scientist Scott Aaronson, author of the popular blog "Shtetl Optimized," in which he entertainingly  addresses P vs. NP, and quantum computing, among other things (...all in 15 minutes):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SczraSQE3MY

This is from a recent TED Talk Symposium held at Caltech in honor of Richard Feynman, and you may find some of the other presentations worth checking out as well.

ALL Data/Knowledge on a Computer

For Real??

It's not April 1st so I guess Stephen Wolfram's stated goal to make ALL the world's data computable is a real one...:

http://tinyurl.com/39stuzc (very long post... transcript actually)

Wolfram lays forth his belief that it may be algorithmically possible to save ALL the world's data/knowledge into a working computer format for practical use:

"The idea is: take all the systematic knowledge—and data—that our civilization has accumulated, and somehow make it computable. Make it so that given any specific question one wants to ask, one can just compute the answer on the basis of that knowledge and data."

Although admitting to skepticism earlier on that this could be achieved, Wolfram (encouraged by the huge success of his Mathematica program) now seems optimistic that it is do-able.

Meanhwile, for the audiophiles, a new (hour-long) math podcast here:

http://pulse-project.org/node/230

Finally, I awoke this morning to find this problem posted on Twitter:

Between them, two numbers use all the digits (1 thru 9). What are they, such that their product is as big as possible?

hmmmm...???