Best to look at recent papers at arxiv https://arxiv.org/list/cs/recent
Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#12You can have a look at Baez's work
https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/
computational category theory. Lots of cool stuff there.
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#13Most bleeding edge stuff is going to be designing the compute pipelines/hardware for ML.
This is really not TCS. I’d say ML foundations count as part of TCS, like VC dimensions, learning theory, and all kinds of complexity.
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#14Lisp is making a comeback
Lisp has been making a comeback since the 60s
> Lisp has been making a comeback since the 60s
That is very true, except in the form of other languages.
It is often said about Lisp (and also about Erlang) that other languages sometime in their lifetime implement some features of Lisp, but in an inferior way :)
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#15I'm not really up to date, but a couple recent papers that I found interesting were:
In theoretical distributed computing, The Space Complexity of Concencus From Swap [0] solves a problem that has been open for a couple decades, and won Best Paper at PODC 2022.
In quantum complexity theory, MIP^* = RE [1] was really big deal when it was published in 2020. It got a (relative) ton of press coverage, and there are lots of articles and blog post available that give a high-level of the result and techniques used. I like this one [2] from Quanta Magazine.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3519270.3538420
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04383
[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro...
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#16Best to look at recent papers at arxiv https://arxiv.org/list/cs/recent
Except that for someone outside CS theory it will be hard to tell what is routine and what is ground-breaking. The proceedings for the recent editions of top theory conferences are here:
- FOCS (Foundations of Computer Science) https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/focs/2022/1JtvJWOs...
- STOC (Symposium on the Theory of Computer Science) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3519935
- SODA (Symposium on Discrete Algorithms) https://epubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9781611977554
They're mostly paywalled but conference or full versions can usually be found on arxiv.org, and there are successful efforts to host paywalled papers illegally for the public good.
Personally, I am impressed by the progress on approximate counting and sampling. Developments include localization schemes (FOCS), average-case entropic independence (FOCS), the sampling/counting Lovász local lemma in (FOCS and SODA), and approximate counting with global constraints (STOC).
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#17Maximum Flow and Minimum-Cost Flow in Almost-Linear Time
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#18You can have a look at Baez's work https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/ computational category theory. Lots of cool stuff there.
> computational category theory
There's also the compositional game theory which is based on it:
Re: Ask HN: What's new in theoretical CS these days?
#19HVAC