Max G. Levy

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

Chatbots Don’t Know What Stuff Isn’t

May 12, 2023

Today’s language models are more sophisticated than ever, but they still struggle with the concept of negation. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

Machines Learn Better if We Teach Them the Basics

February 1, 2023

A wave of research improves reinforcement learning algorithms by pre-training them as if they were human.

Q&A

The AI Researcher Giving Her Field Its Bitter Medicine

August 30, 2022

Anima Anandkumar wants computer scientists to move beyond the matrix, among other challenges.

Machine Learning Gets a Quantum Speedup

February 4, 2022

Two teams have shown how quantum approaches can solve problems faster than classical computers, bringing physics and computer science closer together.

Surprising Limits Discovered in Quest for Optimal Solutions

November 1, 2021

Algorithms that zero in on solutions to optimization problems are the beating heart of machine reasoning. New results reveal surprising limits.

Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

August 26, 2021

One of the strangest results in mathematics explains how it’s possible to turn one sphere into two identical copies, simply by rearranging its pieces.

Q&A

The Coach Who Led the U.S. Math Team Back to the Top

February 16, 2021

Po-Shen Loh has harnessed his competitive impulses and iconoclastic tendencies to reinvigorate the U.S. Math Olympiad program.

New Quantum Algorithms Finally Crack Nonlinear Equations

January 5, 2021

Two teams found different ways for quantum computers to process nonlinear systems by first disguising them as linear ones.