As Bill Gates tells the story, Warren Buffett once challenged him to a game of dice. Each would select one of four dice belonging to Buffett, and then they’d roll, with the higher number winning. […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In algorithms, as in life, negativity can be a drag. Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a graph — a network of nodes connected by links, or edges. Often, […]
A mother gives her baby her all: love, hugs, kisses … and a sturdy army of bacteria. These simple cells, which journey from mother to baby at birth and in the months of intimate contact […]
Their ambitions were always high. When Will Sawin and Melanie Matchett Wood first started working together in the summer of 2020, they set out to rethink the key components of some of the most tantalizing […]
In a sunny lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two starfish fought over their prey. Overlapping arms pinned a hunk of thawing cocktail shrimp against the side of the tank. Thousands of suction cups […]
Animals that produce many offspring tend to have short lives, while less prolific species tend to live longer. Cockroaches lay hundreds of eggs while living less than a year. Mice have dozens of babies during […]
In what specific cases do quantum computers surpass their classical counterparts? That’s a hard question to answer, in part because today’s quantum computers are finicky things, plagued with errors that can pile up and spoil […]
Ask DALL·E 2, an image generation system created by OpenAI, to paint a picture of “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach,” and it will spit out surreal images of exactly that. The program would have […]
In 2021, the Hayabusa2 space mission successfully delivered a morsel of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to Earth — five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion […]
In mid-October, Justin Gilmer flew from California to New York to attend a friend’s wedding. While on the East Coast he visited his former adviser, Michael Saks, a mathematician at Rutgers University, where Gilmer had […]
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