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Mathematics
How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever
9 minutes
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Technology and the self
Why we should worry less about ‘sentient’ AIs and more about what we’re teaching them
16 minutes
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Music
Electronic gloves and even potted plants make music in a playground for sound innovation
6 minutes
essay
History of technology
Ingenious librarians
A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it
Monica Westin
essay
Beauty and aesthetics
Patterns of the lifeworld
Machine learning theory is shedding new light on how to think about the mysterious and ineffable nature of art
Peli Grietzer
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Music
As a pianist strikes a chord, visualisations of his notes appear in real time
5 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
What has feelings?
As the power of AI grows, we need to have evidence of its sentience. That is why we must return to the minds of animals
Kristin Andrews & Jonathan Birch
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Computing and artificial intelligence
Teaching an AI to beat video games still takes human imagination
5 minutes
essay
Evolution
What on earth is a xenobot?
The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks
Philip Ball
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Art
What does an AI make of what it sees in a contemporary art museum?
15 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
The people of the cloud
Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
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Music
Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds
6 minutes
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Computing and artificial intelligence
How machine learning can help historians decode ancient inscriptions
7 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
AI’s first philosopher
Alan Turing was a pioneer of machine learning, whose work continues to shape the crucial question: can machines think?
Sebastian Sunday Grève
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Computing and artificial intelligence
From ‘chandeliers’ to entangled qubits, here’s what happens inside a quantum computer
9 minutes
essay
Cognition and intelligence
Modular cognition
Powerful tricks from computer science and cybernetics show how evolution ‘hacked’ its way to intelligence from the bottom up
Michael Levin & Rafael Yuste
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Technology and the self
When an AI rejects him for life insurance, Mitch wonders if he can escape his fate
7 minutes
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Physics
Models capture the world-warping physics of what happens when stars meet black holes
2 minutes
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Computing and artificial intelligence
Who, exactly, authored this AI-generated spin on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo?
5 minutes
essay
Future of technology
Learn from machine learning
The world is a black box full of extreme specificity: it might be predictable but that doesn’t mean it is understandable
David Weinberger
essay
Stories and literature
The cliché writes back
Machine-written literature might offend your tastes but until the dawn of Romanticism most writers were just as formulaic
Yohei Igarashi
essay
History of technology
Pixel: a biography
An exact mathematical concept, pixels are the elementary particles of pictures, based on a subtle unpacking of infinity
Alvy Ray Smith
video
War and peace
What happens when pacifist soldiers search for peace in a war video game
21 minutes
essay
Neuroscience
The warped self
Social media makes us feel terrible about who we really are. Neuroscience explains why – and empowers us to fight back
Mark Miller & Ben White