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Huck Bennett

@huckbennett.bsky.social
708 followers 232 following 180 posts

Faculty at the University of Colorado. Interested in theoretical computer science, and especially lattices. Also: mountains, running, music. home.cs.colorado.edu/~hbennett

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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I really appreciate the report from the Simons Institute's AI + TCS working group (simons.berkeley.edu/ai-tcs-worki...), even though I don't agree with all of its recommendations. The central thing that I'm wary about is 3.1/3a as a blanket policy. 1/2
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Incompetence and/or malpractice. As with any powerful and dangerous tool, "Whoops! How did that happen? We didn't expect that." is not acceptable. (The OpenAI equivocating that Jeremy got on Twitter is not at all convincing.)
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Congratulations to PNW running/mountain friend Jess (and her esteemed pacer Colin) on outright winning the Mountain Lakes 100-mile race in Oregon! She was 50 minutes ahead of #2 (also a woman) and ~78 ahead of the first man. Fun fact: 100% of my volcano summits have been with Colin and Jess!
2026 Mountain Lakes 100 Race Results
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 19/09/2026
Good question! There is a range of nuanced opinions on this, from "No" to "Are you kidding? No."
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Lance Fortnow @lance.fortnow.com · 17/09/2026
STOC call for papers is out. Deadline is November 2. acm-stoc.org/stoc202... New rules for the AI era: limited submissions, public posting and a required video. Is it a coincidence that the camera-ready deadline is April Fools Day?
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
💯. What a sad place we've ended up in. A year or two ago, we'd just be celebrating the results and the authors.
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Maria Leonor Pacheco @mlpacheco.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Come join us in Boulder! Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...
jobs.colorado.edu
Tenure-Track Faculty in Artificial Intelligence
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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I found Venkat's letter (written in his role as Director of the Simons Institute) on TCS and AI insightful: simons.berkeley.edu/news/letter-.... In particular, "Informed by the results of a widely circulated survey, the Simons Institute will convene a working group next month..."
simons.berkeley.edu
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Gülce @gkardesd.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
New on the low-depth complexity of Group Isomorphism: the first nontrivial circuit lower bounds and quasipoly-size depth-2 1/2 upper bounds -- departing from the generator-enumerator approach underlying prior low-depth work: instead we use composition series, group extensions, & short presentations.
arxiv.org
Group Isomorphism and the Polylogarithmic-Time Hierarchy: Depth-2$\frac{1}{2}$ Circuits and Lower Bounds
In this paper, we investigate the low-depth circuit complexity of Group Isomorphism in the multiplication (Cayley) table model. We prove the first circuit lower bounds for Group Isomorphism: namely, w...
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
I'm in Ottawa, ON, Canada to give a couple of talks at the Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) summer school on Monday: sacworkshop.org/SAC26/schedu.... The first is about lattice basics, LWE, and LWE optimizations. The second is on the lattice-isomorphism problem and related cryptography.
sacworkshop.org
Schedule - Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) 2026
August 24–28, 2026 at the University of Ottawa. SAC is Canada's research conference on cryptography, held annually since 1994.
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karthikcs.bsky.social @karthikcs.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Video playlists from the recently concluded DIMACS workshops: • Algebraic Techniques in FGC (July 20–22): www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... • FGC of String Problems (July 23–25): www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... • FGC of Graph Problems (July 27–31): www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Here's a thread about four papers of mine that are being presented at conferences this week. I won't be at any of them due to the start of classes at CU, but my awesome students and collaborators will! (And, no, none of these papers used AI except for typo checking in one case.) 1/
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Sasho Nikolov @thesasho.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Nikhil Bansal and I wrote a book-length survey of algorithmic and geometric methods in discrepancy theory, and a draft of it is online arxiv.org/abs/2608.00140. This book has been years in the making, and I’m excited to share it. More 👇
arxiv.org
Discrepancy Theory: An Algorithmic and Geometric Perspective
Combinatorial discrepancy theory is a subject with roots in combinatorics, geometry, and number theory, and with numerous applications to mathematics and computer science. At its core, discrepancy the...
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Congratulations to Venkat! We recently used the explicit expander construction from GUV (the CCC paper) to get a compressed sensing scheme, which is the key to our MM algorithms in arxiv.org/abs/2508.10250. (Thanks to @eigx.bsky.social for the pointer to GUV!)
arxiv.org
Output-Sparse Matrix Multiplication Using Compressed Sensing
We give two algorithms for output-sparse matrix multiplication (OSMM), the problem of multiplying two $n \times n$ matrices $A, B$ when their product $AB$ is promised to have at most $O(n^δ)$ many non...
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Yes, the result itself is very interesting (more on this below). From a skim, I agree with Noah that the paper is not well-written. Am I happy to see LLMs invade TCS? No, it's terrible. Is this the most impactful LLM result about lattices this week? Unclear. 1/
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I enjoyed reading that Yu Deng almost became a professional Go player. Go is a fantastic game, which I used to play quite a lot. Here's a picture of playing Go and chess simultaneously with my Go BFF John (www.chungenliu.com; now a full professor of sociology!) when he visited Boulder recently. 3/3
Playing Go and chess simultaneously.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Congratulations to Shayan on winning the Abacus Medal, and to all of the Fields Medal winners! I always really enjoy reading about their work. I've used matroid basis sampling in my own work, and I think (?) I've remembered to mention the improvement to Christofides Algorithm when teaching it. 1/
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
An upcoming talk by my student Evelyn about our joint work with Mitchell Black and Amir Nayyeri from ALT 2026 (arxiv.org/abs/2502.18350) and her follow-up work!
arxiv.org
Graph Inference with Effective Resistance Queries
The goal of graph inference is to design algorithms for learning properties of a hidden graph using queries to an oracle that returns information about the graph. Graph reconstruction, verification, a...
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
This is a brilliant idea!
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karthikcs.bsky.social @karthikcs.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
DIMACS is hosting not one, not two, but three workshops on fine-grained complexity next month, from July 20–31! Registration is free but required. To register, click each relevant workshop page on the DIMACS events page: dimacs.rutgers.edu/events/list Hope to see many of you there!
dimacs.rutgers.edu
DIMACS :: List
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Error Correction Zoo @eczoo.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Big update: the EC Zoo is now a handbook. It spans codes, sphere packings, lattices, designs, groups, and phases of matter. Extensively checked, but not perfect—feedback very welcome: arxiv.org/abs/2606.11484
arxiv.org
Handbook of Error-Correcting Codes
Barcode scans, clear phone calls, reliable data storage, satellite communication, and large-scale quantum computation are all made possible by error correction. We present a handbook version of The Er...
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 04/06/2026
Huge congratulations to Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra, and Alistair Stewart on being awarded the Gödel prize for their breakthrough work on algorithmic robustness! www.sigact.org/prizes/g%C3%...
sigact.org
ACM SIGACT - Gödel Prize
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
I kept thinking about Boaz's blog post, and ended up responding with a fairly long comment. My response touched on a few things I wanted to say anyway, and so I decided to make it a blog post of my own: hdbennett.wordpress.com/2026/05/31/m.... (It's my second blog post ever, and first in >10 years.)
hdbennett.wordpress.com
My Response to Boaz Barak’s Blog Post
This is my response to Boaz Barak’s blog post from 5/30/2026, titled “AI is a Meteor. Don’t be a Dinosaur.” I also left it as a comment on his post (awaiting moderation as of when…
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
I'm saddened that thoughtful, smart people aren't able to leave it at "I think AI is good and I use it." They feel the need to gush, "OMG! If YOU aren't token maxxing every minute of every day then YOU are falling behind! Use it for everything or else!" It's like a cult.
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Nalini Joshi @monsoon0.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
You may find the comments by Melanie Matchett Wood on the discovery of a counter example to Erdős’ Unit Distance Conjecture as interesting as I did 👇🏼(see previous post for a link)
A screenshot of p.17 of the paper available at https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29ad73/unit-distance-remarks.pdf
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
The plane got all of the attention today, but what about higher dimensions? Here's a nice problem: Give an explicit configuration of n points in R^4 such that Theta(n^2) pairs of points are at unit distance. (Note that n^2 is as large as possible.)
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
What I get as the top hit for "CS Theory" on Google search. Turing Machines just look so much shinier with that Matte Finish.
CS theory hair styling clay. Apparently only $33.74 for a duo (most popular).
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 04/05/2026
(Sisyphus teaches at CU Boulder.)
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
One great thing about CU Boulder is that it has a Grammy-award-winning string quartet in residence: the Takács Quartet. Last night, I got to see what was founding cellist András Fejér's last performance with the group after 51 years. He had been the only remaining founding member. 1/2
The Takács QuartetMihai Marica
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
One of my favorite New Yorker covers (cf. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/t... and related stories).
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Happy Earth Day 2026! (Oregon/Colorado)
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
This is very nice recognition of Hal Gabow! Hal spent his whole career as faculty at CU Boulder, and his legacy looms large for us. (Hal retired in 2008, and I unfortunately have never gotten a chance to meet him.)
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Lance Fortnow @lance.fortnow.com · 15/04/2026
Former NSF theory program director Peter Brass guest posts on the state of the foundation.
blog.computationalcomplexity.org
Guest Post from Peter Brass, Former NSF Theory Director, on the NSF budget.
 Guest post from Peter Brass, Former NSF Theory director (though not affiliated with the NSF now) on the White House NSF budget for FY 2027....
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
I was lucky to get to run the Corvallis Half Marathon over the weekend in Oregon! A couple of weeks ago, I was part of a theory Ph.D. thesis defense at U. Colorado where I enjoyed realizing that all of the other faculty on the committee were also runners (and that 3 of 4 are faster than I am).
2026 Corvallis Half Marathon result.
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CU Boulder CS Theory @bouldertheory.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Online CS Theory Seminar this Fri 2026-04-10! We're excited to have Martin Kreuzer (Uni. Passau) presenting "From Code Equivalence to Polynomial Isomorphism" www.digital.uni-passau.de/en/profiles/... www.colorado.edu/cs-theory/th... #MathSky #TCSSky #complexity #AlgebraicGeometry
Photograph portrait of Martin Kreuzer. He is smiling, dressed formally with a bowtie, on a concrete walkway with metal railing, with a metallic-looking building in the background, and vibrant green trees in between.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Congratulations to fantastic @bouldertheory.bsky.social undergraduate @adithyacolorado.bsky.social! I've had the pleasure of getting to work with Adithya during his time at CU, and am very excited to hear about his work going forward.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
10 years ago today: my blog post on AlphaGo and Artificial Intelligence, which I wrote in grad school: hdbennett.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/a....
hdbennett.wordpress.com
AlphaGo and Artificial Intelligence
On Friday, March 11th the world’s best Go player, Lee Sedol, lost the third game in a row of a five game match to Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program. Far from being just games, AlphaGo&#…
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
Emphasis on the attack not coming close to the security claimed by Dilitihium. Dilithium claims 123, 186, and 265 bits of security for classical unforgeability; the attack gets running times of 202, 289, and 400 (for L2, L3, and L5, respectively). (Ref: pq-crystals.org/dilithium/da..., Tbl 1.)
Dilithium specification parameters.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
This New Yorker article about Claude (and AI in general) was excellent: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202.... In a world of 200-character hot takes, TNY's nuanced long-form journalism stands out even more. It's also funny: "investors ... including legendary League of Legends player Sam-Bankman-Fried."
newyorker.com
What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either
Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind—examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Students without technical knowledge will have no ability to recognize if AI outputs something that's sub-optimal or just plain wrong, let alone have any idea about how to produce the right thing. I also think that anthropomorphizing AI as having "read" books is rather misleading.
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karthikcs.bsky.social @karthikcs.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
1/3 Fine-Grained Complexity Fest at DIMACS this July! Three back-to-back workshops on Algebraic Techniques, String Algorithms, and Graph Algorithms in fine-grained complexity, with a terrific speaker lineup. Organized by @jalman.bsky.social , Elazar Goldenberg, and @eigx.bsky.social.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
The University of Colorado made a major, expensive "LLMification of higher ed" deal with OpenAI based on the recommendation of a committee (www.cu.edu/gen-ai#tabs-2) with no CS or STEM faculty, no faculty from CU Boulder, and no one with clear expertise in any aspect of AI or AI-based pedagogy.
cu.edu
Gen AI
[tabs][tab-item title="ChatGPT Edu Information"] ChatGPT Edu soon to be available for eligible CU faculty, staff and students The University of Colorado has entered into a three-year agreement with Op...
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
I wrote a short expository note about a beautiful result of Carmosino, Gao, Impagliazzo, Mihajlin, Paturi, and Schneider for certifying NO instances of 3-SUM in roughly n^{3/2} time, beating the fastest known, roughly n^2-time deterministic algorithm: home.cs.colorado.edu/~hbennett/no.... 1/
home.cs.colorado.edu
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Noah Stephens-Davidowitz @noahsd.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
I wrote up a little blog post proposing a slightly different way to write asymptotic notation. www.solipsistslog.com/a-simple-and... In short, I think asymptotic notation should usually be written with an INequality. E.g., f(n) <= O(n^2), f(n) < o(log n), f(n) > 2^{-o(n)}, f(n) >= n^{-O(1)}, etc.
solipsistslog.com
A simple and modest proposal for improving asymptotic notation | Solipsist's Log
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
To kick off 2026, here's a quick thread on a few mountain ascents from 2025, starting at home in Boulder, Colorado with Mount Sanitas (6,798') at night. 1/4
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Rep. Joe Neguse @neguse.house.gov · 17/12/2025
A deeply dangerous — and blatantly retaliatory action against Colorado — by the Trump administration. NCAR is one of the most renowned scientific facilities in the WORLD — where scientists perform cutting-edge research everyday. We will fight this reckless directive with every legal tool we have.
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Noah Stephens-Davidowitz @noahsd.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
New paper with Surendra Ghentiyala (my wonderful PhD student) and Zeyong Li (a PhD student at NUS) eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2025/... . I'm super excited about this paper!
eccc.weizmann.ac.il
ECCC - TR25-210
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZYQ...
youtube.com
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