![](\"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/capecod.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI just came back from the MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) annual meeting, which was held at a beach resort in Cape Cod. No, it isn’t California, but for at least a few months a year “my” coast can put up a respectable showing too:<\/p>\n
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Out of all the ideas I heard at the CSAIL meeting, the one that made me proudest to have become a professor was this: computer scientists should make a serious effort to address world hunger, deforestation, climate change, and other global crises, because of the significant opportunities to tap funding resource<\/em>s that are becoming available in these areas.<\/em> I’m telling you, if a giant asteroid were going to hit the earth in a week, the first question academics would ask would be how to beat out competing proposals for the $50-million “Deflection of Space-Based Objects” initiative at NSF.<\/p>\n The meeting ended with a “Wild & Crazy Ideas Session,” at which I (naturally) spoke. I briefly considered talking about quantum gravity computing, closed timelike curves, or quantum anthropic postselection, but ultimately decided on something a little less mainstream. My topic was “Experimental Computational Complexity Theory,” or “why do theoretical physicists get $8-billion machines<\/a> for the sole purpose of confirming or refuting their speculative ideas, whereas theoretical computer scientists get diddlysquat?” More concretely, my proposal is to devote some of the world’s computing power to an all-out attempt to answer questions like the following: does computing the permanent of a 4-by-4 matrix require more arithmetic operations than computing its determinant? You can read my slides here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just came back from the MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) annual meeting, which was held at a beach resort in Cape Cod. No, it isn’t California, but for at least a few months a year “my” coast can put up a respectable showing too: Out of all the ideas I heard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[5,15,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity","category-csphysics-deathmatch","category-mirrored-on-csail-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5977,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions\/5977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}