Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedCristopher Moore: preference
4 Sept 2025 Machine Learning Street Talk The Day AI Solves My Puzzles Is The Day I Worry (Prof. Cristopher Moore)
“Right? And I guess what I like about computer science is you put on 1 hat and you look for efficient algorithms for things, and then if you fail to find a good algorithm, you can switch hats and try to prove that the problem is hard.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Cristopher Moore
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 4 Sept 2025
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
Transcript context
…So you spent decades of your career looking at impossibility theorems, and in a sense, why are you biased towards looking at things which are not possible? I guess this is because after I got my PhD in physics and I moved into theoretical computer science, there's a lot of focus there on proving that things are hard. Right? And I guess what I like about computer science is you put on 1 hat and you look for efficient algorithms for things, and then if you fail to find a good algorithm, you can switch hats and try to prove that the problem is hard. I haven't done very much work in cryptography, just a little bit in post quantum cryptography. And there, of course, if a problem is hard, maybe you can use it to build a secure cryptosystem. So I I like that 2 sided nature of computer science and, computational complexity theory. You were saying yesterday in your talk that in the twentieth century, there were many birds where birds as scientists are, you know, let's have a helicopter view. Let's look at things from zoomed out all the way. And there were also frogs who were sort of down in the weeds a little bit. Are you a bird or a frog?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.