Latest Articles
A Digital Locksmith Has Decoded Biology’s Molecular Keys
Neural networks have been taught to quickly read the surfaces of proteins — molecules critical to many biological processes.
Common Sense Comes Closer to Computers
The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. Now a new approach, borrowing from two disparate lines of thinking, has made important progress.
An Idea From Physics Helps AI See in Higher Dimensions
The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.
Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?
A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it's also revealed how far AI has to go.
The Anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence
Iyad Rahwan’s radical idea: The best way to understand algorithms is to observe their behavior in the wild.
His Artificial Intelligence Sees Inside Living Cells
The computer vision scientist Greg Johnson is building systems that can recognize organelles on sight and show the dynamics of living cells more clearly than microscopy can.
Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines
Consciousness is a famously hard problem, so Hod Lipson is starting from the basics: with self-aware robots that can help us understand how we think.
Sum-of-Three-Cubes Problem Solved for ‘Stubborn’ Number 33
A number theorist with programming prowess has found a solution to 33 = x³ + y³ + z³, a much-studied equation that went unsolved for 64 years.
A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think
Neural networks are famously incomprehensible, so Been Kim is developing a “translator for humans.”