The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option—they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can continue indefinitely. That square grid has a property shared by many other tilings: Shift the …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In our increasingly digital lives, security depends on cryptography. Send a private message or pay a bill online, and you’re relying on algorithms designed to keep your data secret. Naturally, some people want to uncover those secrets—so researchers work to …
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Apple’s new Vision Pro mixed-reality headset goes on sale tomorrow, and the hype cycle has officially begun. The pricey product, which could be a giant bust or mark the beginning of a new era of spatial computing, was placed firmly on the heads of a first round of tech journalists …
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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 training has driven prices of the crucial components through the roof. OpenAI has said that training the algorithm that now …
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The world’s biggest computing companies and a raft of well-funded startups all agree: The future of computing is manipulating data with quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, governments, private companies, and venture capitalists have collectively invested billions of dollars into quantum computing, which aims to solve problems using a new …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Algorithms have become ubiquitous. They optimize our commutes, process payments, and coordinate the flow of internet traffic. It seems that for every problem that can be articulated in precise mathematical terms, there’s an algorithm that can solve it, at least …
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