Think of the tune to “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Now sing these lyrics: Neg-a-tive b, plus or minus The square root of b squared mi-nus four a c All! over two a This jingle has […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In January 2022, a small team of physicists watched breathlessly as data streamed out of Google’s quantum computer, Sycamore. A sharp peak indicated that their experiment had succeeded. They had mixed one unit of quantum […]
Bob Metcalfe has always been a believer in the power of networking. In the 1980s and 1990s he helped popularize the idea that a network’s value grows rapidly with the number of users, a precept […]
On Sunday, February 5, Olof Sisask and Thomas Bloom received an email containing a stunning breakthrough on the biggest unsolved problem in their field. Zander Kelley, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, […]
When the paleontologist Michael D’Emic cut into the bones of Majungasaurus, a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex that roamed Madagascar 70 million years ago, he suspected that surprises might be hiding in them. But what he […]
What movie do these emojis describe? That prompt was one of 204 tasks chosen last year to test the ability of various large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines behind AI chatbots such as […]
A year after he started his Ph.D. in mathematics at McGill University, Matt Bowen had a problem. “I took my qualifying exams and did absolutely horribly on them,” he said. Bowen was sure that his […]
Our bodies consist of about 30 trillion human cells, but they also host about 39 trillion microbial cells. These teeming communities of bacteria, viruses, protozoa and fungi in our guts, in our mouths, on our […]
Nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the primordial plasma of the infant universe cooled enough for the first atoms to coalesce, making space for the embedded radiation to soar free. That light — the […]
Once in a while, a person can take an abstract concept that’s seemingly too vague for formal study and offer an elegant formal definition. Claude Shannon did it with information, and Andrey Kolmogorov did it […]
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