Computer science

This holiday season, catch up on science and math news while solving our year-end crossword.

When equipped with hidden layers, deep neural networks can accomplish nonlinear feats that are difficult even with sophisticated mathematics.

And not destroy humanity in the process.

To efficiently analyze a firehose of data, scientists first have to break big numbers into bits.

A new version of AlphaGo needed no human instruction to figure out how to clobber the best Go player in the world — itself.

What happens when you increase the number of layers in an artificial neural network?

The real-world version of the famous “traveling salesman problem” finally gets a good-enough solution.

A new idea is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.

A tiny self-organized mesh full of artificial synapses recalls its experiences and can solve simple problems. Its inventors hope it points the way to devices that match the brain’s energy-efficient computing prowess.