Scott Aaronson

About

I'm Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. My research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Programming language
• Mathematical economics
• Quantum mechanics
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Theoretical computer science

Selected publications

• A very preliminary analysis of DALL-E 2

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2022 · 88 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The DALL-E 2 system generates original synthetic images corresponding to an input text as caption. We report here on the outcome of fourteen tests of this system designed to assess its common sense, reasoning and ability to understand complex texts. All of our prompts were intentionally much more challenging than the typical ones that have been showcased in recent weeks. Nevertheless, for 5 out of the 14 prompts, at least one of the ten images fully satisfied our requests. On the other hand, on…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• New Approaches for Quantum Copy-Protection

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2021 · 44 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Certified randomness using a trapped-ion quantum processor

  Nature · 2025-03-26 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Although quantum computers can perform a wide range of practically important tasks beyond the abilities of classical computers 1,2 , realizing this potential remains a challenge. An example is to use an untrusted remote device to generate random bits that can be certified to contain a certain amount of entropy 3 . Certified randomness has many applications but is impossible to achieve solely by classical computation. Here we demonstrate the generation of certifiably random bits using th…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Certified Randomness from Quantum Supremacy

  2023-05-16 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We propose an application for near-term quantum devices: namely, generating cryptographically certified random bits, to use (for example) in proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. Our protocol repurposes the existing “quantum supremacy” experiments, based on random circuit sampling, that Google and USTC have successfully carried out starting in 2019. We show that, whenever the outputs of these experiments pass the now-standard Linear Cross-Entropy Benchmark (LXEB), under plausible hardness assumptions…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Testing GPT-4 with Wolfram Alpha and Code Interpreter plug-ins on math and science problems

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-08-10 · 9 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  This report describes a test of the large language model GPT-4 with the Wolfram Alpha and the Code Interpreter plug-ins on 105 original problems in science and math, at the high school and college levels, carried out in June-August 2023. Our tests suggest that the plug-ins significantly enhance GPT's ability to solve these problems. Having said that, there are still often "interface" failures; that is, GPT often has trouble formulating problems in a way that elicits useful answers from the plug-…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• 2012 Waterman Award

  NSF · $1.0M · 2012–2017

• CAREER: Efficient Computation in the Physical World

  NSF · $579k · 2009–2014

Frequent coauthors

• A. G. White

  University of Queensland

  21 shared

• Alessandro Fedrizzi

  Heriot-Watt University

  20 shared

• Matthew A. Broome

  20 shared

• Andrew Drucker

  19 shared

• Elad Hazan

  Google (United States)

  18 shared

• Satyen Kale

  17 shared

• Andris Ambainis

  17 shared

• Xinyi Chen

  Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data

  17 shared

Labs

• Quantum Information Center - UT AustinPI

Education

• Ph.D., Theoretical Computer Science

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

  2006

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of Texas at Austin

Awards & honors

• 2018 - Tomassoni-Chisesi Award
• 2016 - Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship
• 2015 - IT from Qubit: Simons Collaboration on Quantum Fields…
• 2012 - Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Founda…
• 2011 - Best Paper, International Computer Science Symposium…

Similar researchers at University of Texas at Austin

• Aditya Akellah-60
• Chandrajit Bajajh-56
• Swarat Chaudhurih-33