In Computers, Memory Is More Useful Than Time
The Quanta Podcast
Quanta Magazine
4.7 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.
This is the third episode of our new weekly series The Quanta Podcast, hosted by Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel. This week's guest is Ben Brubaker; he recently published "For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time.”
(If you've been a fan of Quanta Science Podcast, it will continue as 'audio edition episodes' in this same feed every other week.)
Historical Recording © Jack Copeland and Jason Long
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Let's say for the sake of analogy that I keep all of my clothes in a pile in the corner of my room. |
| 0:11.0 | It's the most compact way to store them. The pile takes up so little space, but it takes forever to find anything. |
| 0:18.0 | In this case, finding my favorite sweater takes a little space and a lot |
| 0:23.7 | of time. But I get sick of digging to find what I want to wear, not to mention the wrinkles, |
| 0:29.6 | so I decide to institute a new system. I will put each and every piece of clothing into its |
| 0:36.5 | own clearly labeled box that I then alphabetize and stack all over my room. |
| 0:42.3 | This way I can find that sweater in an instant, but now my room is full of boxes. |
| 0:48.3 | The same process finding that sweater now takes a ton of space but can be done in very little time. I traded some of the space in my |
| 0:58.2 | room for more free time in the morning. If you can think of a better way to organize my clothes and find |
| 1:04.1 | that sweater, I'd like to hear it. And by the way, you're now thinking a little like a computer |
| 1:09.0 | scientist. |
| 1:18.6 | Welcome to the Quanta podcast where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math. I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quanta magazine, and that clothing analogy came to me from one of our staff writers here at Quanta, Ben Brubaker. Ben wrote about this |
| 1:28.9 | tradeoff between time and space in computer science last year. In one of our newsletters |
| 1:33.4 | called Fundamentals, you should definitely sign up for it at Quantamagizine.org. The most obvious |
| 1:39.3 | solution to my clothing conundrum to get a dresser to balance my space and time resources is pretty simple. |
| 1:47.0 | But getting a complete handle on how computer scientists think about space and time, that's a |
| 1:53.1 | little more complex. Ben writes regularly for Quanta about developments in the world of computer |
| 1:58.5 | science, and his latest piece tracks a major |
| 2:01.5 | breakthrough related to space and time, one that experts have called stunning and massive and |
| 2:07.0 | beautiful, and we'd like to talk about it. So, Ben, welcome to the show. |
| 2:10.1 | Thanks so much for having me. |
| 2:11.9 | Before we dive into this, what's the big idea? Where are we going with the conversation |
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