Here’s a game Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented in 1948. He was trying to model the English language as a random process. Go to your bookshelf, pick up a random book, open it ...

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When language evolves, most might assume it evolves for a reason. But new research upends that idea—a lot of the time, language evolves completely at random. Linguists pooled their expertise with ...

Romera-Paredes and colleagues’ work is the latest step in a long line of research that attempts to create programs automatically by taking inspiration from biological evolution, a field called genetic ...