Complexity in the Era of AI and Data-Driven Computing

We live in a new age of computing, driven by faster distributed computation, strong optimization, data-driven algorithms, and of course remarkable advances in artificial intelligence. We’ve made dramatic progress on problems thought unsolvable a decade ago.

What does this brave new world tell us about computational complexity? The classic P vs NP problem shifts from a barrier telling us what we cannot do to a guide to what’s possible. We are heading towards a surprising utopian computing world where we can solve many difficult problems quickly in practice while all our cryptographic protocols remain secure, and where we can make significant progress in learning in nearly every domain.

We’ll give a (mostly) non-technical overview that takes a step back and rethinks complexity in light of these advances, what AI tells us about complexity, and what complexity tells us about AI. We search for not only answers, but the right questions to help us chart the future of both fields.

About Dr. Fortnow

Lance Fortnow is a professor in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He founded the College of Computing at Illinois Tech and served as its inaugural dean from June 2020 to June 2025, after starting as the Dean of Science in 2019. Prior to that he was the chair of School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications. His work on interactive proof systems and time-space lower bounds for satisfiability have led to his election as a 2007 ACM Fellow. In addition he was an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992-1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97. His current research focuses on how artificial intelligence changes the way we think about both the theory and applications of computing.

Among his many activities, Fortnow served as the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transaction on Computation Theory, served as chair of ACM SIGACT and on the Computing Research Association board of directors. He served as chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity from 2000-2006. Fortnow originated and co-authors the Computational Complexity weblog since 2002, the first major theoretical computer science blog. He has over six thousand social media followers.

Fortnow's survey The Status of the P versus NP Problem is one of the CACM's most downloaded article. Fortnow has written a popular science book The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible loosely based on that article.