Not so Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science

In this post, I describe an algorithm of Edith Cohen, which estimates the size of the transitive closure of a given directed graph in near-linear time. This simple, but extremely clever algorithm...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/estimating-transitive-closure/

Below is a post by Ilya on a new circuit lower bound. Let  be a Boolean function of arguments. What is the smallest circuit that can compute if the set of allowed gates consists of all the unary...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/not-3n-anymore/

Recently a preprint was posted to ECCC, with the pulse-quickening title “Explicit Two-Source Extractors and Resilient Functions“. If the result is correct, then it really is — shall I say i...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/purifying-spoiled-randomness-with-spoiled-randomness/

After a long break since the last time we touched upon distribution testing, we are back to discuss two papers that appeared this month on the arXiv — and hopefully some of their implications....

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2015/08/09/distribution-testing-do-it-with-class/

On Friday, April 10th, MIT will be hosting the second Sublinear Algorithms Day. This event will bring together researchers in the northeast for a day of interaction and discussion. Sublinear Day ...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/sublinear-day-at-mit/

Summary In this post I will show that any normed space that allows good sketches is necessarily embeddable into an space with close to . This provides a partial converse to a result of Piotr Indy...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/sketching-and-embedding-are-equivalent-for-norms/

In the eleventh and final installment of our STOC 2014 recaps, Jerry Li tells us about a spectacularly elegant result by Daniel Kane. It’s an example of what I like to call a “one-page wonde...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/insensitive-intersections-of-halfspaces-stoc-2014-recaps-part-11/

A major use case for coin flipping (with actual coins) is when you’re with friends, and you have to decide where to eat. This agonizing decision process can be elegantly avoided when randomness...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/so-alice-and-bob-want-to-flip-a-coin-stoc-2014-recaps-part-10/

In the next post in our series of STOC 2014 recaps, Adrian Vladu tells us about some of the latest and greatest in Laplacian and SDD linear system solvers. There’s been a flurry of exciting res...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/faster-i-say-the-race-for-the-fastest-sdd-linear-system-solver-stoc-2014-recaps-part-9/

Thought you were rid of us? Not quite: in a last hurrah, Clément and I come back with a final pair of distribution estimation recaps — this time on results from the actual conference! Gautam...

https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/an-encore-more-learning-and-testing-stoc-2014-recaps-part-8/