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 ...

Machine learning is not new. We have witnessed it since the 1990s, when Amazon introduced a new “recommended for you” section for its users to display more personalized results. When we search for ...

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 ...

Shortest path algorithms like Dijkstra, BFS, and advanced approximations power everything from Google Maps to network routing. Understanding when and how to apply them can save time and resources in ...

A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a potentially more effective way of helping computers solve some of the toughest optimization problems they face. Their ...

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 ...

From picking stocks to examining x-rays, artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to make decisions that were formerly up to humans. But AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and ...

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 ...