Ben Brubaker in Quanta:
One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams(opens a new tab) set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing. It was a rough sketch of a mathematical proof that memory was more powerful than computer scientists believed: A small amount would be as helpful as a lot of time in all conceivable computations. That sounded so improbable that he assumed something had to be wrong, and he promptly set the proof aside to focus on less crazy ideas. Now, he’d finally carved out time to find the error.
That’s not what happened. After hours of poring over his argument, Williams couldn’t find a single flaw.
“I just thought I was losing my mind,” said Williams, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the first time, he began to entertain the possibility that maybe, just maybe, memory really was as powerful as his work suggested.
More here.
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