Algorithms

Maintenance of the software that’s used for the hardest physics calculations rests almost entirely with a retiree. The situation reveals the problematic incentive structure of academia.

Inspired by the results of a game-playing neural network, mathematicians have been making unexpected advances on an age-old math problem.

Anima Anandkumar wants computer scientists to move beyond the matrix, among other challenges.

Computer scientists have found a new type of problem that quantum computers can solve dramatically faster than their classical counterparts.

Intelligent beings learn by interacting with the world. Artificial intelligence researchers have adopted a similar strategy to teach their virtual agents new tricks.

Computer scientists can now solve a decades-old problem in practically the time it takes to write it down.

Why verify every line of a proof, when just a few checks will do?

Finding out whether a question is too difficult to ever solve efficiently depends on figuring out just how hard it is. Researchers have now shown how to do that for a major class of problems.

Researchers say we’re on the cusp of “GoPro physics,” where a camera can point at an event and an algorithm can identify the underlying physics equation.