An easy choice for paper of the year, a paper that has nothing to do with randomness, interaction, quantum, circuits or codes. Just a near quadratic improvement in the amount of memory you need to simulate time.

Simulating Time with Square-Root Space by Ryan Williams

Any time (t(n)) algorithm can be simulated in space (O(\sqrt{t(n)\log t(n)})) greatly improving the (O(t(n)/\log t(n))) result from the 70’s. Ryan’s work makes strong use of last year’s space efficient tree evaluation by James Cook and Ian Mertz. More in my February post and a Quanta article which did a better job explaining the importance of the result than I could.

Bill is also excited by the new (O(m\log^{2/3}n)) single-sourced shortest path algorithm by Ran Duan, Jiayi Mao, Xiao Mao, Xinkai Shu and Longhui Yinthat that beats out Dijkstra on sparse graphs.

Last year I wrote

We’re heading to a perfect storm for US higher education with the oncoming trains of the new administration, artificial intelligence, fiscal challenges and the demographic cliff. Hang on tight, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Bumpy is an understatement and we’re just starting the ride. Limited immigration, National Science Foundation woes in its 75th anniversary, and a drop in computer science enrollments as AI continues to suck up the atmosphere. Do we buckle down or should we completely rethink our institutions?

In the spirit of all the AI wrapped content, I asked Claude to put together a full year in review for this blog. This is getting scarily good.

We remember George Foreman, Frank Gehry, Ray Laflamme, Tom Lehrer, Charles Lin, Pradyut Shah and Tom Stoppard.

We thank our guest posters Eric Allender, Daniel Fernández and Alberto Fraile, Clyde Kruskal and Nick Sovich.

See you all in January!