Computing, Sudoku-style
When Alexey Radul began graduate work at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2003, he was interested in natural-language processing — designing software that could understand ordinary written English. But he was so dissatisfied with the computer systems that natural-language researchers had to work with that, in his dissertation, he ended up investigating a new conceptual framework for computing. The work, which Radul is now pursuing as a postdoc in the lab of Gerald Sussman, the Matsushita Professor of Electrical Engineering, is still in its infancy. But it could someday have consequences for artificial-intelligence research, parallel computing and the design of computer hardware.Artificial-intelligence systems, Radul explains, often tackle problems in stages. A natural-language program trying to make sense of a page of written text, for instance, first determines where words and sentences begin and end; then it identifies each word’s probable part of speech; then it diagrams the...