Tag: Quantum Stuff

What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it around and it becomes easier. The worst approach is almost always trial and error, which involves plugging in possible solutions until one… Continue reading Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier

The upshot, Andrews said, is that “we might not need nearly as much equipment as we thought we did” to achieve consciousness. She noted, for example, that even a cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the mammalian brain, which is believed to play a role in attention, perception, memory and other key aspects of… Continue reading Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare

Back in the 1990s, Mrowka and Kronheimer investigated what happens when you excise a two-dimensional surface from a four-dimensional manifold. If the manifold itself is simply connected, what conditions must surfaces meet to guarantee that their complements must also be simply connected? Kronheimer and Mrowka knew that some kinds of surfaces could have complements that… Continue reading Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions

Ruehle and collaborators took up the old problem of approximating Calabi-Yau metrics. Anderson and others also revitalized their earlier attempts to overcome step 2. The physicists found that neural networks provided the speed and flexibility that earlier techniques had lacked. The algorithms were able to guess a metric, check the curvature at many thousands of… Continue reading AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities

In that sense, in microbial communities, the keystone species concept is context-dependent. A keystone in one microbiome might not be a keystone in another. “I feel that this aspect has not been highly appreciated by ecologists,” Liu said. Ecologists are now grappling with this contextual nature of keystone species beyond microbes and pondering whether, and how,… Continue reading Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’

In 2016, I joined Natalie, Siobhan Roberts and Emily Singer in profiling four master science and math teachers as part of an education series that included video vignettes produced by my former New York Times colleague Lisa Iaboni, an interactive survey of readers’ experiences with math and science built by Emily Fuhrman, my interview with… Continue reading My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine

As a network trains, it tends to learn more complex functions, and the discrepancy between the expected output and the actual one starts falling for training data. Even better, this discrepancy, known as loss, also starts going down for test data, which is new data not used in training. But at some point, the model… Continue reading How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data?

You can create a graph with the angle as the x-axis and the speed as the y-axis. But since traveling 360 degrees brings you back to the start, you can sew together the vertical lines where x is zero degrees and where x is 360 degrees. This makes a cylinder. The cylinder doesn’t directly reflect… Continue reading Geometers Engineer New Tools to Wrangle Spacecraft Orbits