unique games conjecture – Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians Complete Quest to Build ‘Spherical Cubes’

Jordana Cepelewicz — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 15:10:34 +0000

In the fourth century, the Greek mathematician Pappus of Alexandria praised bees for their “geometrical forethought.” The hexagonal structure of their honeycomb seemed like the optimal way to partition two-dimensional space into cells of equal area and minimal perimeter — allowing the insects to cut down on how much wax they needed to produce, and to spend less time and energy building their hive.

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First Big Steps Toward Proving the Unique Games Conjecture

Erica Klarreich — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 21:43:44 +0000

A paper posted online in January takes theoretical computer scientists halfway toward proving one of the biggest conjectures in their field. The new study, when combined with three other recent papers, offers the first tangible progress toward proving the Unique Games Conjecture since it was proposed in 2002 by Subhash Khot, a computer scientist now at New York University. Over the past decade and...

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Subhash Khot, Playing Unique Games in Washington Square Park

Thomas Lin, Olena Shmahalo and Lucy Reading-Ikkanda — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 15:00:46 +0000

As a Princeton University graduate student in 2001, Subhash Khot was visiting his family in India and thinking about his research on the limits of computation when he came up with a good, if seemingly modest, idea. He was thinking about an analytic theorem that Johan Håstad, one of his mentors, had formulated (and Jean Bourgain had proved) and how it could be applied to the “hardness of...

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A Grand Vision for the Impossible

Thomas Lin and Erica Klarreich — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 20:00:12 +0000

One summer afternoon in 2001, while visiting relatives in India, Subhash Khot drifted into his default mode — quietly contemplating the limits of computation. For hours, no one could tell whether the third-year Princeton University graduate student was working or merely sinking deeper into the living-room couch. That night, he woke up, scribbled something down and returned to bed.

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