Date and time: Aug 29, 2025, 12-1:45pm
Location: Rice 109
Some topics and speakers we had:
Jinye He: The Ramsey numbers on the blue-red edge coloring of complete graphs. R(s, t) > R(s-1) + R(s, t-1), where R(s,t) is the smallest number N such that any blue-red edge coloring on the complete graph K(N) must contain a blue subgraph K(s) or a red subgraph K(t).
Chase Fickes: The (two-party, 1 out of 2) oblivious transfer is complete (necessary and sufficient) for the secure multiparty computation for any functionality.
Varun Vejalla: To color R^2 so that no two points of distance 1, the minimum number of colors is between 5 and 7. The case of 4 colors is ruled out in a poly-math project using the help of computer verification. It is open.
Chen-Yu Wei: Dynamics of learning in games. Consider min-max zero-sum game f(x, y) = x^T A y for some matrix A in R^{m times n}, where x is the maximizer and y is the minimizer. When performing gradient ascend on x and gradient descend on y, the strategy of (x,y) diverges from the Nash Equilibrium in a spiral-out way. There are two ways to modify the gradient descent (called optimistic GD) so that it converges spiral in.
Jack Doerner: Cleve's lower bound. https://kodu.ut.ee/~swen/courses/crypto-ii/2008/cleve1986.pdf