In the past decade, machine learning has received tremendous attention with the success of deep neural networks (or more generally deep learning) in practically relevant tasks such as natural language ...

Time’s passage is non-negotiable. Its flow marks the progress of our lives, moving clearly in one direction. It is, by nature, asymmetrical. In this way, we perceive it to move like an arrow, ...

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien ...

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico ...