MIT Researcher's Groundbreaking Discovery Reveals Memory's Surprising Power

Space and time aren’t just woven into the background fabric of the universe. To theoretical computer scientists, time and space (also known as memory) are the two fundamental resources of computation. Algorithms require a roughly proportional amount of space to runtime, and researchers long assumed there was no way to achieve anything better. In a stunner of a result — “the best thing in 50 years,” in the words of one of the world’s leading computer scientists — Ryan Williams, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found thatmemory is far more powerful than anyone had realized. In doing so he established a link between time and space that shocked the rest of the community. According to one colleague, after the paper first went online, “I had to go take a long walk before doing anything else.”