A bet for the new decade

I am in Tel Aviv Theory Fest this week – a fantastic collection of talks and workshops organized by Yuval Filmus , Gil Kalai, Ronen Eldan, and Muli Safra.

It was a good chance to catch up with many friends and colleagues. In particular I met Elchanan Mossel and Subhash Khot, who asked me to serve as a “witness” for their bet on the unique games conjecture. I am recording it here so we can remember it a decade from noe.

Specifically, Elchanan bets that the Unique Games conjecture will be proven in the next decade – sometime between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2029 there will be a paper uploaded to the arxiv with a correct proof of the conjecture. Subhash bets that this won’t happen. They were not sure what to bet on, but eventually agreed to take my offer that the loser will have to collaborate on a problem chosen by the winner, so I think science will win in either case. (For what it’s worth, I think there is a good chance that Subhash will lose the bet because he himself will prove the UGC in this decade, though it’s always possible Subhash can both win the bet and prove the UGC if he manages to do it by tomorrow 🙂 )

The conference itself is, as I mentioned, wonderful with an amazing collection of speakers. Let me mention just a couple of talks from this morning. Shafi Goldwasser talked about “Law and Algorithms”. There is a recent area of research studying how to regulate algorithms, but Shafi’s talk focused mostly on the other direction: how algorithms and cryptography can help achieve legal objectives such as the “right to be forgotten” or the ability to monitor secret proceedings such as wiretap requests.

Christos Papadimitriou talked about “Language, Brain, and Computation”. Christos is obviously excited about understanding the language mechanisms in the brain. He said that studying the brain gives him the same feeling that you get when you sit in a coffee shop in Cambridge and hear intellectual discussions all around you: you don’t understand why everyone is not dropping everything they are doing and come here. (Well, his actual words were “sunsets over the Berkeley hills” but I think the Cambridge coffee shops are a better metaphor 🙂 )