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Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?
Researchers are uncovering the hidden laws that reveal how the Internet grows, how viruses spread, and how financial bubbles burst.
The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks.
The Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky has died at 51. This 2015 article describes his computer-aided quest to eliminate human error and rewrite the century-old rules underlying all of mathematics.
Computer scientist Stuart Russell wants to ensure that our increasingly intelligent machines remain aligned with human values.
A quantum computing pioneer explains why the near future of quantum computation may lie in simulators, not general-purpose quantum machines.
New research suggests physicists, computers and brains employ the same procedure to tease out important features from among other irrelevant bits of data.
Subhash Khot’s bold conjecture is helping mathematicians explore the precise limits of computation.
An insight borrowed from computer science suggests that evolution values both fitness and diversity.