The most powerful (and useless) algorithm

We made a video about a nonstandard way to understand the A* algorithm. This blog post collects a few more clarifications, thoughts, and links. Another Example of a Run of A* Here is another run of A*, this time from Sarajevo (in the Balkans) to southeast Italy. You can notice that at the beginning, there … Continue reading The hidden beauty of...

We recently made a Polylog video about the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated topic in a broadly understandable way, while being slightly imprecise and leaving out the messy technical details. This post is where I explain those details so that I can sleep well at night. EDIT: … Continue reading What P vs NP is...

Recently, Avi Wigderson won the Turing Award (see 1, 2, 3, 4) and we decided to make a video explaining a bit about his work on derandomization. This was definitely one of our most ambitious projects at Polylog. Anything with randomness and complexity theory is inherently hard to explain in 15 minutes, so we needed … Continue reading Avi...

We made a new video with the Polylog team! This post collects some interesting bits that did not make it into the final cut. Also, we promised a follow-up video with one of my all-time favorite mathematical proofs. Upon some reflection and due to the relatively low number of views of the video, I will … Continue reading Why arguing generals...

In the book Surely, You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman tells a story of how he provoked math students at Princeton by asking them to explain what problems they were working on. He would then tell them pretty much instantly what the answer to their problem is. The catch is: just the answer, no … Continue reading If there is no reason for...