Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
1 min read
Summary
Andrew Krapivin, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, has caused a rethink in computer science after challenging a widely-used tool in the field by proving a 40-year-old conjecture wrong.
Through studying a paper titled ‘Tiny Pointers’, Krapivin discovered a way to further miniaturise pointers within a computer’s memory.
This required him to find a more effective way of organising the data that the pointers would point to, so he turned to a common approach for storing data called a hash table.
Through tinkering with this, Krapivin invented a new kind of hash table that works faster than expected and disproved a long-held conjecture.
Although hash tables have been studied for decades, there remains questions around how they work, such as how fast they can be when inserting or searching for something.
Krapivin unintentionally challenged convention as he was unaware of Yao’s conjecture.
