Computational Complexity

The advances in artificial intelligence have changed the way we think about computing. For today's post, how nonuniformity plays a much ...

 I sometimes give the following advice for research which I label Bill's Bad Advice . We will later see who it might be good advice for....

This fall, for the first time at Illinois Tech, I'm teaching Introduction to Theory of Computation. While I've taught a variation of...

      Several people emailed me that September 16, 2025 ---written as  9-16-25  in the US---represents the integer side lengths of a right t...

Each fall I try to predict the theory computer science faculty job market to come and give suggestions to those going after them. Get set fo...

(ADDED LATER- a Sad Note. The older Charles Lin passed away in December of 2025.) In 2001 I supervised Charles Lin's Master's Thesis...

A few comments to last week's post Computers Don't Want  suggested that human brains are just advanced computers, yet still possess ...

You used AI in your work. Do you hide it or brag about it?  1) In 2002 there was a movie  Simone  about an actress who is really an AI.  The...

I read through the new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies  by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. "It" refers to Artificial Su...

Martin Kruskal was born Sept 28, 1925 and passed away on Dec 26, 2006, at the age of 81 (we did two posts for his memorial,  here   and here...

A few weeks ago I took an Uber to a regional airport and was picked up by a Tesla. The driver used FSD, so-called Full Self-Driving, never t...

  STUDENT: What did you do before the web to find papers? BILL: We went to the library and copied papers to read later. STUDENT: Did you rea...

When announcing Open-AI's latest release last month, Sam Altman said "GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to ...

 "I'll be on vacation so I won't be checking email.'' "I can't be at the meeting since I will be out of town...

(After I wrote this post Lance tweeted a pointer to a great talk by Ronald de Wolf with more examples, and also examples of quantum proofs, ...

When I first became a professor I had it all planned out, I would do research, teach and supervise students, get tenure and do more research...

Coding Style Is Important Does coding style matter? We teach students how to write code and about algorithms. But, do we discuss coding styl...

This will be one of a series of posts that I've always wanted to write but I needed to wait until I was no longer an academic administra...

(This post was inspired by  George Foreman , who passed away March 21, 2025, at the age of 76.) About 10 years ago I asked my class What is ...

I've heard this story from a few places. A father watches Back to the Future II with his kid. The 1989 movie view of 2015 looks entirel...