Faithful simulations of the world are impossible to create using ordinary computers. Simulating physical reality is, however, the original, express purpose of quantum computers. In 1981, long before quantum computers gained notoriety as potential tools […]
As we listen to a piece of music, our ears perform a calculation. The high-pitched flutter of the flute, the middle tones of the violin, and the low hum of the double bass fill the […]
The latest ambition of artificial intelligence research — particularly within the labs seeking “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — is something called a world model: a representation of the environment that an AI carries around […]
Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of […]
According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the behavior of a black hole depends on two numbers: how heavy it is, and how fast it is rotating. And that’s it. Black holes are said […]
In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was a graduate student in physics at the University of Oregon. When his doctoral adviser […]
Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and — wait for it — 47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. These are […]
Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. […]
When she was a kid, Karen Lloyd enjoyed mucking around along estuaries and beaches on the coast of North Carolina where she lived. With net in hand, the future microbial geochemist dredged up seaweed and […]
Since their discovery in 1982, exotic materials known as quasicrystals have bedeviled physicists and chemists. Their atoms arrange themselves into chains of pentagons, decagons and other shapes to form patterns that never quite repeat. These […]
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