The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more. For more than 40 years, Avi Wigderson ...

Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of ...

Such is Turing's legacy: that of a nested chain of pretenses, each pointing not to reality, but to the caricature of another idea, device, individual, or concept. It's hard to overestimate Alan Turing ...

In the 1980s, Andrew Barto and Rich Sutton were considered eccentric devotees to an elegant but ultimately doomed idea—having machines learn, as humans and animals do, from experience. Decades on, ...

Elucidating pattern forming processes is an important problem in the physical, chemical and biological sciences. Turing’s contribution, after being initially neglected, eventually catalysed a huge ...

String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a patch of space, the theory says, and you won’t see a menagerie of ...