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A New Design for Cryptography’s Black Box

September 2, 2015

A recent cryptographic breakthrough has proven difficult to put into practice. But new advances show how near-perfect computer security might be surprisingly close at hand.

The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation

July 23, 2015

Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?

The New Laws of Explosive Networks

July 14, 2015

Researchers are uncovering the hidden laws that reveal how the Internet grows, how viruses spread, and how financial bubbles burst.

Will Computers Redefine the Roots of Math?

May 19, 2015

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.

Q&A

Concerns of an Artificial Intelligence Pioneer

April 21, 2015

Computer scientist Stuart Russell wants to ensure that our increasingly intelligent machines remain aligned with human values.

Q&A

Quantum Computing Without Qubits

January 22, 2015

A quantum computing pioneer explains why the near future of quantum computation may lie in simulators, not general-purpose quantum machines.

Machine Intelligence Cracks Genetic Controls

December 18, 2014

Scientists have begun to decipher the most difficult-to-read parts of the genome — the parts that don’t code for proteins. The new work reveals how errors in these genetic instructions can lead to disease.

A Common Logic to Seeing Cats and Cosmos

December 4, 2014

New research suggests physicists, computers and brains employ the same procedure to tease out important features from among other irrelevant bits of data.

A Grand Vision for the Impossible

August 12, 2014

Subhash Khot’s bold conjecture is helping mathematicians explore the precise limits of computation.

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