This is the question posed by Pedro Domingos in his book The Master Algorithm:How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. The book provides an in-depth overview of machine ...

Algorithms. Is there anything they can’t do? Yes. Tons of stuff, but they remain at the heart of the internet as we know it. Much of what we are exposed to online courtesy of search engines or Siri or ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve—akin to identifying a ...

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they’ll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can ...

Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first ...

Grade school math students are likely familiar with teachers admonishing them not to just guess the answer to a problem. But a new proof establishes that, in fact, the right kind of guessing is ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...