  Time domain science has undergone a revolution over the past decade, with
tens of thousands of new supernovae (SNe) discovered each year. However,
several observational domains, including SNe within days or hours of explosion
and faint, red transients, are just beginning to be explored. Here, we present
the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), a novel optical time-domain survey on the
Pan-STARRS telescopes. Our survey is designed to obtain well-sampled $griz$
light curves for thousands of transient events up to $z \approx 0.2$. This
large sample of transients with 4-band light curves will lay the foundation for
the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,
providing a critical training set in similar filters and a well-calibrated
low-redshift anchor of cosmologically useful SNe Ia to benefit dark energy
science. As the name suggests, YSE complements and extends other ongoing
time-domain surveys by discovering fast-rising SNe within a few hours to days
of explosion. YSE is the only current four-band time-domain survey and is able
to discover transients as faint $\sim$21.5 mag in $gri$ and $\sim$20.5 mag in
$z$, depths that allow us to probe the earliest epochs of stellar explosions.
YSE is currently observing approximately 750 square degrees of sky every three
days and we plan to increase the area to 1500 square degrees in the near
future. When operating at full capacity, survey simulations show that YSE will
find $\sim$5000 new SNe per year and at least two SNe within three days of
explosion per month. To date, YSE has discovered or observed 8.3% of the
transient candidates reported to the International Astronomical Union in 2020.
We present an overview of YSE, including science goals, survey characteristics
and a summary of our transient discoveries to date.
