In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match. The achievement looked like a milestone on the road to machine intelligence: a computer had conquered a game associated for centuries with planning, calculati...
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Dig beneath a forest and the roots are not alone. Wrapped around them, penetrating them and extending far beyond them are microscopic fungal threads called hyphae. Together those threads for...
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Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We r...
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Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
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Few words sound more futuristic than “robot.” It belongs to Mars rovers, factory arms, humanoid machines and today's arguments about artificial intelligence. Yet the word did not originate i...
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When artificial-intelligence stocks surge, most attention goes to the companies designing the chips. Nvidia became the emblem of the AI boom because its GPUs perform much of the enormous par...
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Few numbers can transform an ordinary convenience-store counter into a national obsession as quickly as a giant lottery jackpot. Once Powerball or Mega Millions climbs into the hundreds of m...
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Every September, the technology calendar suddenly becomes crowded. New phones appear within days of one another. Operating systems move from summer previews to public releases. Chipmakers an...
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During Atlantic hurricane season, a disturbance thousands of miles from Florida can become one of the most searched subjects in the United States within hours. A colored blob appears on a we...
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You are reading an email, driving home or trying to fall asleep when one eyelid begins to flutter. It stops. Ten minutes later it starts again. By the third day, a tiny muscle movement that...
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