The research work of Prof. Zoltán Toroczkai and former Notre Dame postdoc Mária Ercsey-Ravasz is featured on the cover of the December issue of Nature Physics. "Optimization hardness as transient chaos in an analog approach to constraint satisfaction," is the title of the article.
Constraint-satisfaction problems are among the computationally hardest tasks: solutions are efficiently checkable, but no efficient algorithms are known to compute those solutions. Fresh insight might come from physics. A study mapping optimization hardness onto the phenomena of turbulence and chaos suggests that constraint-satisfaction problems can be tackled using analog devices.
COVER IMAGE ZOLTÁN TOROCZKAI
COVER DESIGN KAREN MOORE