Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies.

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.

To understand what quantum computers can do — and what they can’t — avoid falling for overly simple explanations.

Two new approaches allow deep neural networks to solve entire families of partial differential equations, making it easier to model complicated systems and to do so orders of magnitude faster.