fcortes
Joined 1 year ago
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Dec 22
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Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 2 months ago
This is kind of why P vs NP is such an interesting problem. It seems that a big family of NP-hard problems in fact _can_ be solved efficiently if we allow relaxing some constraints, like optimality (eg TSP), or generality of our algorithm (eg type checking).
I feel that is similar to how adding randomness to cryptography [1] opened a bunch of new systems like zero knowledge proofs[2]. By allowing us to be wrong in a very small number of instances (arbitrarily small by adjusting things like key size), we can build practical systems with really impressive properties.
[1]: Goldwasser and Micali - Probabilistic Encryption, 1983 https://web.archive.org/web/20090319000035/http://groups.csa... [2]: Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff - The knowledge complexity of interactive proof-systems, 1985 https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2008/handouts/1989-siamj...
Comment · 5 months ago
A couple of months ago I wrote a small post [1] (in Spanish) about subsampled MRI image reconstruction using compressed sensing and how it relates to government funding issues. At the time Tao had written some posts [2] about how the IPAM, where Terrence Tao was working, was losing some funding because UCLA wouldn't follow some new federal government policies.
[1] https://fintualist.com/chile/ciencia/los-efectos-de-las-pole... [2] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114956840959338146
Comment · 1 year ago
Fun fact: S2 and EC2 sound exactly the same in Spanish - both are "ese dos". Add that to EC2 and S3 already being confusing to tell apart by ear
https://www.google.com/maps/place/31%C2%B016'58.6%22N+34%C2%...