The 9th Workshop on Hard Computational Problems: Theories, Algorithms and Applications (HCP 2026) was held at the Qingdao campus of Shandong University (SDU) from July 31 to Aug 2.

More than 100 scholars, industry representatives, and students from 47 institutions and organizations in China and abroad attended the event. Participants came from leading Chinese universities, Graz University of Technology in Austria, the Technology Innovation Institute in the United Arab Emirates, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The workshop focused on complex computational problems across fields including artificial intelligence, high-end industrial software, cybersecurity, and the digital economy, with an emphasis on the integration of theoretical research with practical applications.

Wang Xiaoyun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said researchers should respond more closely to major national strategic needs. Wang also encouraged them to identify fundamental scientific questions from real-world challenges, strengthen collaborative research, and leverage theoretical innovation to advance breakthroughs in essential technologies.

The program featured four keynote presentations and 12 thematic presentations. Topics included exact solution methods for large-scale facility location problems, termination analysis of polynomial programs, quantum circuit optimization, and machine learning algorithms for large-scale datasets.

Other discussions covered combinatorial optimization and automated cryptanalysis.

A roundtable discussion on development and reliability in the AI era explored the opportunities and challenges AI poses for code development, software and hardware reliability, formal verification, and automated algorithm design.

The workshop also presented recent research in constraint solving, parallel computing, automated cryptanalysis, and AI model-assisted problem solving.