{"id":974,"date":"2012-03-15T12:47:06","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T17:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=974"},"modified":"2017-01-13T15:08:40","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T20:08:40","slug":"big-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=974","title":{"rendered":"Big news"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Judea Pearl has <a href=\"http:\/\/amturing.acm.org\/award_winners\/pearl_2658896.cfm\">won a richly-deserved Turing Award<\/a>, for his pioneering work on reasoning under uncertainty, Bayesian inference, and causality.\u00a0 Much like last year&#8217;s winner Leslie Valiant, Pearl has been a perfectly-plausible candidate since the 1980s; it was really just a question of when they&#8217;d get around to him.\u00a0 For those who don&#8217;t know his work, Pearl&#8217;s landmark book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pearl\/dp\/052189560X\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1331832634&amp;sr=8-1\">Causality<\/a> provides a wonderful introduction to at least one major strand of his thought; I read it this summer and it inverted the way I think about lots of things in statistics.\u00a0 (Pearl&#8217;s fame precedes this award, partly for a tragic reason: he&#8217;s probably best known to the public as the father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl.)<\/p>\n<p>In other big news, playing Super Mario Bros. is now known to be NP-complete, as shown in this <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1203.1895v1.pdf\">landmark paper<\/a> by Greg Aloupis, Erik Demaine, and Alan Guo.\u00a0 The sheer intuitiveness of the gadget constructions, at least to anyone who grew up playing Nintendo, makes this probably my favorite NP-completeness paper of all time (well, I guess tied with some papers by Cook, Karp, and Levin).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Judea Pearl has won a richly-deserved Turing Award, for his pioneering work on reasoning under uncertainty, Bayesian inference, and causality.\u00a0 Much like last year&#8217;s winner Leslie Valiant, Pearl has been a perfectly-plausible candidate since the 1980s; it was really just a question of when they&#8217;d get around to him.\u00a0 For those who don&#8217;t know his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","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,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-complexity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=974"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3158,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions\/3158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}