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How Public Key Cryptography Really Works, Using Only Simple Math
The security system that underlies the internet makes use of a curious fact: You can broadcast part of your encryption to make your information much more secure. For thousands of...
The Computer Scientist Who Builds Big Pictures From Small Details
To better understand how machines learn, Lenka Zdeborová treats them like physical materials. As a teenager in the Czech Republic, Lenka Zdeborová glimpsed her future in an Isaac Asimov novel....
How ‘Embeddings’ Encode What Words Mean — Sort Of
Machines work with words by embedding their relationships with other words in a string of numbers. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a...
What Is Machine Learning?
Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time. By now, many people think they know what machine learning is:...
Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out.
The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas. Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding...
The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think With Analogies
Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired...
Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks.
...succeed at the same-different task, but a bunch of nonhuman animals do, too — including ducklings and bees,” said Chaz Firestone, who studies visual cognition at Johns Hopkins University. The...
How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits
The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound questions and concepts in mathematics....
![A glass object being shaped by a blowtorch.]](https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Glass_520x292.jpg)
Why Is Glass Rigid? Signs of Its Secret Structure Emerge.
At the molecular level, glass looks like a liquid. But an artificial neural network has picked up on hidden structure in its molecules that may explain why glass is rigid...