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John Pavlus

Contributing Writer

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Q&A

The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think With Analogies

By John Pavlus
July 14, 2021
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Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies.

An array of blocky orange objects of all different shapes, with a single blue blob in one of the rows and columns.
artificial intelligence

Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks.

By John Pavlus
June 23, 2021
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For all their triumphs, AI systems can’t seem to generalize the concepts of “same” and “different.” Without that, researchers worry, the quest to create truly intelligent machines may be hopeless.

Abstractions blog

How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits

By John Pavlus
December 10, 2020
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The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound questions and concepts in mathematics.

A glass object being shaped by a blowtorch.]
Abstractions blog

Why Is Glass Rigid? Signs of Its Secret Structure Emerge.

By John Pavlus
July 7, 2020
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At the molecular level, glass looks like a liquid. But an artificial neural network has picked up on hidden structure in its molecules that may explain why glass is rigid like a solid.

A digital simulacrum of a protein.
Abstractions blog

A Digital Locksmith Has Decoded Biology’s Molecular Keys

By John Pavlus
June 3, 2020
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Neural networks have been taught to quickly read the surfaces of proteins — molecules critical to many biological processes.

artificial intelligence

Common Sense Comes Closer to Computers

By John Pavlus
April 30, 2020
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The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. Now a new approach, borrowing from two disparate lines of thinking, has made important progress.

Illustration of a pair of lungs being scanned in three dimensions, with a status bar that reads “Scanning lung tissue: 60%.”
artificial intelligence

An Idea From Physics Helps AI See in Higher Dimensions

By John Pavlus
January 9, 2020
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The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.

Illustration of cartoon characters working alongside a machine.
artificial intelligence

Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?

By John Pavlus
October 17, 2019
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A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it’s also revealed how far AI has to go.

The researcher Iyad Rahwan sitting at his desk.
Q&A

The Anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence

By John Pavlus
August 26, 2019
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Iyad Rahwan’s radical idea: The best way to understand algorithms is to observe their behavior in the wild.


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About the author

John Pavlus is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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