Why Adding a Full Hard Drive Can Make a Computer More Powerful

Those are pretty stringent constraints, so it wasn’t obvious that the extra memory could ever prove useful. But to their surprise, Buhrman and Cleve showed that if you tweak bits in just the right way, you really can get extra computational oomph out of a full memory. “That was aContinue Reading

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science

On the library’s side, some people thought Ginsparg was too hands-on. Others said he wasn’t patient enough. A “good lower-level manager,” according to someone long involved with arXiv, “but his sense of management didn’t scale.” For most of the 2000s, arXiv couldn’t hold on to more than a few developers.Continue Reading

Quantum Computing Is Dead. Long Live Quantum Computing!

This is the year of quantum science and technology. Literally: The United Nations said so. But no amount of pomp and hype can make something true. The fact is, it’s been the year of quantum nearly every year for many, many years now. It’s always the next big thing. It’sContinue Reading