Shtetl-Optimized

Holy crap … yesterday I was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences! If you don’t believe me, click the link and keep scrolling down until you hit the name “Aaronson.” But then continue scrolling to see 144 other inductees, including my IAS postdoctoral classmate Maria Chudnovsky, my longtime friend and colleague Salil Vadhan, […]

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (1934-2026) won the 1980 Turing Award for numerous contributions to computer science, including foundational work on concurrency and formal verification and the invention (with Dijkstra) of the dining philosophers problem. But he’s perhaps best known, to pretty much everyone who’s ever studied CS, as the inventor of the Quicksort algorithm. […]

Imagine that every week for twenty years, people message you asking you to comment on the latest wolf sighting, and every week you have to tell them: I haven’t seen a wolf, I haven’t heard a wolf, I believe wolves exist but I don’t yet see evidence of them anywhere near our town. Then one evening, you hear a howl in the distance, and sure enough, on a hill overlooking the town is the clear silhou…

For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum fault-tolerance with lower overhead than was previously known, by using high-rate codes, which could work for example in neutral-atom architectures (or possibly other architectures that allow nonlocal operations,…

Yesterday Dana, the kids, and I went to the theater to watch The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist, the well-reviewed new documentary about whether AGI will destroy the world. This was surely the weirdest family movie night we’ve ever done. Firstly, because I personally know probably half of the many people interviewed in the film, from Eliezer Yudkowsky to Ajeya Cotra to Liv Boeree to Da…

Last summer, I was privileged to teach a two-week course on theoretical computer science to exceptional 11- and 12-year-olds at Epsilon Camp, held at Washington University in St. Louis. The course was basically a shorter version of the 6.045 course that I used to teach to undergrads at MIT. I was at Epsilon Camp to accompany my son Daniel, who attended a different course there, for the 7- and 8-y…

I’m on a spring break vacation-plus-lecture-tour with Dana and the kids in Mexico City this week, and wasn’t planning to blog, but I see that I need to make an exception. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the Turing Award, for their seminal contributions to quantum computing and information including the BB84 quantum key distribution scheme. This is the first-ever Turing Award specific…

Scott’s foreword: I’ve known fellow quantum computing theorist Daniel Gottesman, now at the University of Maryland, for a quarter-century at this point. Daniel has been a friend, colleague, coauthor, and one of the people from whom I’ve learned the most in my career. Today he writes about a topic close to my heart, and one to which I’ve regularly lent this blog over the decades: namely, the strug…

Last Thursday, my friend and colleague Sam Baker, in UT Austin’s English department, convened an “emergency panel” here about the developing Pentagon/Anthropic situation, and asked me to speak at it. Even though the situation has continued to develop since then, I thought my prepared remarks for the panel might be of interest. At the bottom, I include a few additional thoughts. Hi! I’m Scott Aaro…

Sorry to interrupt your regular programming about the AI apocalypse, etc., and return to the traditional beat of this blog’s very earliest years … but I’ve now gotten multiple messages asking me to comment on something called the “JVG (Jesse–Victor–Gharabaghi) algorithm” (yes, the authors named it after themselves). This is presented as a massive improvement over Shor’s factoring algorithm, which…

To start on a somber note: those of us at UT Austin are in mourning this week for Savitha Shan, an undergrad double major here in economics and information systems, who was murdered over the weekend by an Islamist terrorist who started randomly shooting people on Sixth Street, apparently angry about the war in Iran. Two other innocents were also killed. As it happens, these murders happened just …

I don’t have time to write a full post right now, but hopefully this is self-explanatory. Regardless of their broader views on the AI industry, the eventual risks from AI, or American politics, right every person of conscience needs to stand behind Anthropic, as they stand up for their right to [checks notes] not be effectively nationalized by the Trump administration and forced to build murderbo…

- The STOC’2026 accepted papers list is out. It seems to me that there’s an emperor’s bounty of amazing stuff this year. I felt especially gratified to see the paper on the determination of BusyBeaver(5) on the list, reflecting a broad view of what theory of computing is about. - There’s a phenomenal profile of Henry Yuen in Quanta magazine. Henry is now one of the world leaders of quantum comple…

So, a group based in Sydney, Australia has put out a preprint with a new estimate of the resource requirements for Shor’s algorithm, claiming that if you use LDPC codes rather than the surface code, you should be able to break RSA-2048 with fewer than 100,000 physical qubits, which is an order-of-magnitude improvement over the […]

The following are prepared remarks that I delivered by Zoom to a student group at my old stomping-grounds of MIT, and which I thought might interest others (even though much of it will be familiar to Shtetl-Optimized regulars). The students asked me to share my “optimistic vision” for the year 2050, so I did my […]

This is just a quick announcement that I’ll be hosting Nate Soares—who coauthored the self-explanatorily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky—tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5PM at UT Austin, for a brief talk followed by what I’m sure will be an extremely lively Q&A about his book. Anyone in the Austin area is […]

Friend-of-the-blog Salil Vadhan has asked me to share the following. The Trevisan Award for Expository Work is a new SIGACT award created in memory of Luca Trevisan (1971-2024), with a nomination deadline of April 10, 2026. The award is intended to promote and recognize high-impact work expositing ideas and results from the Theory of Computation. The exposition can have various […]

Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and had zero email or any other contact with him … which is more (less) than some of my […]

The following guest post was written by a Shtetl-Optimized fan in Iran, who’s choosing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. I’m in awe of the courage of this individual and the millions of other Iranians who’ve risked or, tragically, sacrificed their lives these past few weeks, to stand for something about as unequivocally good and […]

Here’s a 53-minute podcast that I recorded this afternoon with a high school student named Micah Zarin, and which ended up covering …[checks notes] … consciousness, free will, brain uploading, the Church-Turing Thesis, AI, quantum mechanics and its various interpretations, quantum gravity, quantum computing, and the discreteness or continuity of the laws of physics. I strongly recommend 2x speed …