In the early 1950s, a group of researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study embarked on a high-tech project. At the behest of John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine, the physicist Hedvig Selberg programmed the […]
Category: quantamagazine
For a decade now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat” or “tiger cat,” for example, to […]
Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, predicting experimental results with stunning accuracy and advancing the study of higher dimensional mathematics. Yet, there’s also reason to believe that it […]
In the third century BCE, Archimedes posed a riddle about herding cattle that, he claimed, only a truly wise person could solve. His problem ultimately boiled down to an equation that involves the difference between […]
Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do […]
All living cells power themselves by coaxing energetic electrons from one side of a membrane to the other. Membrane-based mechanisms for accomplishing this are, in a sense, as universal a feature of life as the […]
In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equations that precisely described the space-time outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn’t be coined for a few more […]
In a rectangular room draped in camouflage netting, four Harris’ hawks took turns flying back and forth between grass-covered perches while scientists recorded their every biomechanical flutter. The researchers were partaking of the time-honored pursuit […]
Artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to learn in fits and starts. Instead of continuously updating their knowledge base with new information over time as humans do, algorithms can learn only during the training phase. After […]
Last year, the particle physicist Lance Dixon was preparing a lecture when he noticed a striking similarity between two formulas that he planned to include in his slides. The formulas, called scattering amplitudes, give the […]
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