Key take Aways from the Milner Award lecture in Royal Society

Yesterday evening I cycled to Royal Society to attend a talk given by the Milner Award recipient of 2026.

Milner Award is given every year by Royal Society for outstanding accomplishments in computer science by an European researcher.

The talk was given by Johan Håstad. A Swedish born MIT trained Mathematician whose research areas includes Cryptography, Computational Complexity, Parallel Computing etc.

He gave a talk on the history of various complex computational problems and how we were able to develop efficient algorithms for it.

He started by talking about factoring numbers and progressed all the way down to traveling salesman problem.

Three things that I thought were interesting

1. He mentioned that solving one of the NP complete problems will help us to solve all other problems in that category. Which I found very interesting. Clearly I should have paid more attention in my algorithmic class.

2. He said that OpenAI recently improved the time complexity of a complex problem slightly by kind of throwing models at it. And he expects a lot of computationally complex problems to be solved in the coming years. And he kind of jokingly said you folks can also try to solve before them.

3. He seems to look generally optimistic about the future and said it would be great unless AI kill us all.