Computer science

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks.

Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format.

Larger models can pull off greater feats, but the accessibility and efficiency of smaller models make them attractive tools.

In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle.

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications.

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities.