Ben Brubaker

Staff Writer

Latest Articles

Q&A

The Researcher Who Explores Computation by Conjuring New Worlds

March 27, 2024

Russell Impagliazzo studies hard problems, the limits of cryptography, the nature of randomness and more.

How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute

March 21, 2024

Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why.

Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information

February 23, 2024

Two researchers have proved that Penrose tilings, famous patterns that never repeat, are mathematically equivalent to a kind of quantum error correction.

‘Magical’ Error Correction Scheme Proved Inherently Inefficient

January 9, 2024

Locally correctable codes need barely any information to fix errors, but they’re extremely long. Now we know that the simplest versions can’t get any shorter.

Q&A

The ‘Accidental Activist’ Who Changed the Face of Mathematics

January 3, 2024

Throughout her 60-year career, Lenore Blum has developed new perspectives on logic and computation while championing women in mathematics and computer science. Now consciousness is on her mind.

An Easy-Sounding Problem Yields Numbers Too Big for Our Universe

December 4, 2023

Researchers prove that navigating certain systems of vectors is among the most complex computational problems.

Thirty Years Later, a Speed Boost for Quantum Factoring

October 17, 2023

Shor’s algorithm will enable future quantum computers to factor large numbers quickly, undermining many online security protocols. Now a researcher has shown how to do it even faster.

Tiny Language Models Come of Age

October 5, 2023

To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic children’s stories.

Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking

September 5, 2023

Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms.

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