Computing, Sudoku-style
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - 08:10
in Mathematics & Economics
When Alexey Radul began graduate work at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2003, he was interested in natural-language processing -- designing software that could understand ordinary written English. But he was so dissatisfied with the computer systems that natural-language researchers had to work with that, in his dissertation, he ended up investigating a new conceptual framework for computing. The work, which Radul is now pursuing as a postdoc in the lab of Gerald Sussman, the Matsushita Professor of Electrical Engineering, is still in its infancy. But it could someday have consequences for artificial-intelligence research, parallel computing and the design of computer hardware.