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 ...

We’ve all heard the KISS talk: Keep It Simple, Stupid. And it’s good advice if you’re preparing an argument or making a presentation. There are rafts of management tools—from spreadsheets to process ...

Ragnar van der Merwe received funding from the John Templeton Foundation as part of the project The Evolution of Complexity hosted at Bath University. Alex Broadbent received funding from the John ...

What’s easy for a computer to do, and what’s almost impossible? Those questions form the core of computational complexity. We present a map of the landscape. How fundamentally difficult is a problem?