Computer science

Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also face major obstacles.

By making use of randomness, a team has created a simple algorithm for estimating large numbers of distinct objects in a stream of data.

Researchers are drawing on ideas from game theory to improve large language models and make them more consistent.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.

After years of false starts, a team of computer scientists has found a way to efficiently deduce the Hamiltonian of a physical system at any constant temperature.

The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas.

Researchers have shown how to find the simplest description of a data set faster than by simply checking every possibility.

By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems.

The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.