The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve—akin to identifying a peak to climb—and then they must develop a strategy to solve it. Classical and quantum researchers compete using differentContinue Reading
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these enigmas, we take what we know about space, time, gravity, and quantum mechanics and apply itContinue Reading
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters”—the adjustable knobs that determine connections among data and get tweaked during the training process. With more parameters,Continue Reading
Moore designed his pinball machine to complete the analogy to the Turing machine. The starting position of the pinball represents the data on the tape being fed into the Turing machine. Crucially (and unrealistically), the player must be able to adjust the ball’s starting location with infinite precision, meaning thatContinue Reading
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
