Computer science

In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle.

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications.

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities.

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal.

A new proof marks the first progress in decades on important cases of the so-called kissing problem. Getting there meant doing away with traditional approaches.

Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural networks to explore how people learn.