It's a simple word that has developed a sinister connotation: algorithm. For many of us, algorithms help determine what we watch, read and listen to — in the process, confirming our tastes and biases, ...

Whether it’s during a long drive, exercising or unwinding at home, sometimes you just want to hear your favorite tunes. Naturally, you shuffle through the songs you’ve taken the time to save, or “like ...

In 2023, the website then known as Twitter partially open sourced its algorithm for the first time. In those days, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk had only recently acquired the platform, and he claimed ...

According to God of Prompt on Twitter, DeepMind researchers have identified a phenomenon called 'Grokking' where neural networks may train for thousands of epochs with little to no improvement, then ...

According to God of Prompt (@godofprompt), grokking was first discovered by accident in 2022 when OpenAI researchers trained AI models on simple mathematical tasks such as modular addition and ...

Personalized algorithms may quietly sabotage how people learn, nudging them into narrow tunnels of information even when they start with zero prior knowledge. In the study, participants using ...

When Edsger W. Dijkstra published his algorithm in 1959, computer networks were barely a thing. The algorithm in question found the shortest path between any two nodes on a graph, with a variant ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

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 ...

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...