Oct 14
To many of us, the government shutdown is inexplicable: a crazy situation, brought about a minority faction over a bill that’s already been passed into law. But for math professor Peter Turchin, it was entirely predicable.
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Oct 09
There are depressing moments. There are dark places. And then there’s being a 31-year-old man carefully stacking Sour Patch Kids on the kitchen counter in a silent apartment at 2:00am.
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Oct 07
Unboxing videos are perhaps the biggest waste of YouTube storage to grace the planet: watch a pimple-faced youth take a phone out of a cardboard container and play with some basic functions! Woo. But here’s one worth watching.
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Oct 02
D-Wave’s quantum computer overcomes key math challenge, doesn’t silence skeptics
Posted in: Today's Chili
D-Wave has long wanted to show that its quantum computing technology is the real deal, and it may have just come closer to proving its case. The company now says that its computer has calculated Ramsey numbers, or solutions to optimization-based math problems that are sometimes difficult to find using traditional systems. The computation represented one of the biggest-ever implementations of an algorithm, according to researchers. However, the feat isn’t necessarily proof of quantum computing at work. As Wired explains, we’ve seen all of these numbers in previous experiments; the challenge wasn’t difficult enough to require the involvement of a quantum computer. However, D-Wave may have better evidence in the future. Its third-generation system, due in 2015, should have enough power to find Ramsay numbers that are theoretically impossible to calculate today.
Filed under: Alt
Via: Wired
Source: Physical Review Letters
Oct 02
Given the amount of inane gibbering that fills your Twitter timeline, it can sometimes take an age to scroll through all that… insight. But what if it was a real, physical, thing? How far would you actually be scrolling?
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Oct 02
A recent study seemed to suggest that political ideology can have a profound effect on how good you are at math. But how accurate is that finding?
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Sep 30
In an episode of The Simpson’s called The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace, Homer appears to write a valid solution to defeat Fermat’s Last Theorem on a blackboard. But given that Fermat’s last theorem is proven, is it real?
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Sep 26
Language translation is a notoriously difficult task for humans, let alone computers. But in trying to solve that problem Google has stumbled across a clever trick, that involves treating them like maps—and it really, really works.
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Sep 24
If this entire planet, solar system and galaxy just doesn’t hold enough excitement for you, be prepared to pick up some speed—because scientists have worked out that you need to be travelling at a staggering 1.2 million mph to exit the Milky Way.
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Sep 24
Encoding symbols and characters in digital form is fairly easy—but making sure that everyone in the world is doing it in the same way sure isn’t. Fortunately, Unicode came along—but how the hell does it work?
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