Channels ▼   Computing, Sudoku-Style  Alexey Radul began
graduate work at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) in 2003, he was interested in natural-
language processing -- designing software that could understand
ordinary written English. But he was so dissatisfied with the
computer systems that natural-language researchers had to work
with that, in his dissertation, he ended up investigating a new
conceptual framework for computing. The work, which Radul is now
pursuing as a postdoc in the lab of Gerald Sussman, the
Matsushita Professor of Electrical Engineering, is still in its
infancy. But it could someday have consequences for artificial-
intelligence research, parallel computing and the design of
computer hardware.  Artificial-intelligence systems, Radul
explains, often tackle problems in stages. A natural-language
program trying to make sense of a page of written text, for
instance, first determines where words and sentences begin and
end; then it identifies each word's probable