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With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits
After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer programs can get.
How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It
Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science.
The Question of What’s Fair Illuminates the Question of What’s Hard
Computational complexity theorists have discovered a surprising new way to understand what makes certain problems hard.
Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try
Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.
Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation for Quantum Secrecy
Researchers have proved that secure quantum encryption is possible in a world without hard problems.
AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help?
Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also face major obstacles.
Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count
By making use of randomness, a team has created a simple algorithm for estimating large numbers of distinct objects in a stream of data.
Game Theory Can Make AI More Correct and Efficient
Researchers are drawing on ideas from game theory to improve large language models and make them more consistent.
New AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.