Thomas Dean

AI researcher who, with Mark Boddy, coined the term "anytime algorithms" in a 1988 AAAI paper — algorithms that can be interrupted at any point and return a progressively better answer the longer they run.

Matters to this vault as the namer of a 38-year-old concept that turns out to anticipate the "spend more compute at answer-time" shape now called test-time compute: Dean & Boddy's own text states "we christen them anytime algorithms" (claim-dean-boddy-1988-anytime-algorithms-formalize-compute-for-quality-tradeoff). He also co-authored, with Boddy, the 1994 "deliberation scheduling" paper a 2026 position paper on LLM test-time compute names as a direct theoretical ancestor (claim-anytime-algorithms-continuously-connected-not-stent-premature).

References

• claim-dean-boddy-1988-anytime-algorithms-formalize-compute-for-quality-tradeoff
• claim-anytime-algorithms-continuously-connected-not-stent-premature
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-21-does-the-history-of-ai-or-cognitive-science.md