The Blog of Scott Aaronson
Whatever you’ve been writing to me to ask if I’m aware of: yeah, I’m aware of it. In particular: Anyway, about the AI stuff. I don’t know whether this is literally our last year alive—I doubt it—but it’s pretty clearly the last year of math and theoretical computer science research in the style we’ve known […]
A week ago, a philosopher named Amit Hagar put out a preprint entitled The NISQ Trap: Eight Years of Demonstrations the Hardware was Built to Lose. Here’s the abstract: With a single clear exception, every NISQ-era flagship demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ has, within eighteen months of its announcement, been classically reproduced, shown to rest on […]
Here at the National Academy of Sciences, it seems that my first job is to serve on the selection committee for the prestigious Michael and Sheila Held Prize in combinatorial and discrete optimization and related areas. The committee chair, my former MIT colleague Madhu Sudan (now at Harvard), invited me to share the following message […]
As I’ve written before, these past couple years I’ve often felt like the last remaining person in either quantum computing or AI who lacked a stake in some startup company whose valuation is right now shooting into interstellar space. My academic colleagues, including the ones who seemed the most singleminded about quantum oracle separations and […]
I’m at the New Jersey shore with family and friends, where we’ve spent this Fourth of July eating hot dogs, playing miniature golf, and wading into the ocean that my great-grandparents crossed to escape calamities they knew about and much greater calamities that they didn’t. Tonight we’ll see the fireworks, weather permitting. And yes, on […]
Scott’s foreword: Cynthia Dwork is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and a pioneer in the fields of differential privacy and algorithmic fairness. On my recent travels to the SigmaWest science camp and then STOC, there was much talk about a recent Trump administration action that would ban not only differential privacy, but […]
Spreading the Gospel of Theoretical Computer Science to an Ω(1) Fraction of Humanity (Or, How We Can Do Like the Physicists)Scott Aaronson’s Trevisan Award Acceptance SpeechSalt Lake City, Utah, June 23, 2026 Thank you so much! It’s one of the highlights of my life, frankly, to accept the first-ever Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work […]
One of the most popular posts in this blog’s history was Common Knowledge and Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, based on a lecture that I gave to high-school students 11 years ago. One of the impacts of that post, I’m proud to say, is that (according to Steven Pinker) it helped to inspire Steve’s excellent recent popular […]
I’ve been getting emails from journalists asking me to comment on the new White House executive order on quantum computing. Alas, I don’t have time for a long response or interviews since I’m at a beautiful science camp in the California mountains, and heading soon to STOC’2026 in Salt Lake City. But I gave anyone […]
Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Last week, five authors (Chatterjee, Ghosh, Gurjar, Raj, and Thierauf) posted a major paper to the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, which shows (or anyway, credibly […]