‘Reverse Mathematics’ Illuminates Why Hard Problems Are Hard | Quanta Magazine

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent.

‘Reverse Mathematics’ Illuminates Why Hard Problems Are Hard | Quanta Magazine

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent.

s20n blog

Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems | Quanta Magazine

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks.

Hard problems that reduce to document ranking

There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively1 for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate N-day vulnerabilities—a sufficiently domain-specific problem that can be solved using general purpose language models as comparators in document ranking algorithms. I demonstrated at RVAsec ‘24 that listwise document ranking can be used to locate the specific function in a patch diff that actually fixes a vulnerability described by a security advisory, and later wrote on the Bishop Fox blog in greater defense of listwise ranking by publishing a command-line tool implementation (raink) to prove the idea.

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?

The long read: Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots