The New Hatred of Technology
People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good …
computing
Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key …
A Celebrated Cryptography-Breaking Algorithm Just Got an Upgrade
This is a job for LLL: Give it (or its brethren) a basis of a multidimensional lattice, and it’ll spit out a better one. This process is known as lattice …
The One Part of Apple Vision Pro That Apple Doesn’t Want You to See
Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal. Courtesy of Joanna Stern If Vision Pro is mostly meant to be used from a couch cushion or desk chair, the external battery …
ChatGPT’s Hunger for Energy Could Trigger a GPU Revolution
The cost of making further progress in artificial intelligence is becoming as startling as a hallucination by ChatGPT. Demand for the graphics chips known as GPUs needed for large-scale AI …
The Holy Grail of Quantum Computing Is Finally Here. Or Is It?
Andersen and Lensky of Google disagree. They do not think the experiment demonstrates a topological qubit, because the object cannot reliably manipulate information to achieve practical quantum computing. “It is …
He’s back: Sam Altman and the chaos at the heart of the AI industry – podcast | News
Sam Altman has been a reassuring figure to anyone worried about the future of artificial intelligence. As the head of OpenAI, which started out as a non-profit organisation that aimed …
Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking
Turing’s diagonalization proof is a version of this game where the questions run through the infinite list of possible algorithms, repeatedly asking, “Can this algorithm solve the problem we’d like …
The Lawlessness of Large Numbers
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. So far this year, Quanta has chronicled three major advances in Ramsey theory, the study of how to avoid creating …
A Novel Type of Neural Network Comes to the Aid of Big Physics
Graham tried tweaking the CNN approach so that the kernel would only be placed on 3-by-3 sections of the image that contain at least one pixel that has nonzero value …