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Category: computing – Page 768

The Yoda of Silicon Valley

Of course, all the algorithmic rigmarole is also causing real-world problems. Algorithms written by humans — tackling harder and harder problems, but producing code embedded with bugs and biases — are troubling enough. More worrisome, perhaps, are the algorithms that are not written by humans, algorithms written by the machine, as it learns.

Profiles in science.

Donald Knuth, master of algorithms, reflects on 50 years of his opus-in-progress, “The Art of Computer Programming.”

Donald Knuth at his home in Stanford, Calif. He is a notorious perfectionist and has offered to pay a reward to anyone who finds a mistake in any of his books. Credit Credit Brian Flaherty for The New York Times.

MIT Scientists Just Used a Biological Virus to Make Faster Computers

When your computer stores data, it has to pause while the information moves from one piece of hardware to another.

But that may soon stop being the case, as scientists from MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design uncovered a new manufacturing trick that should let them build computers that don’t have those annoying delays.

The key is to sit back and let a virus — the biological kind — handle the assembly work.

A new type of quantum computer has smashed every record

IonQ was founded on a gamble that ‘trapped ion quantum’ computing could outperform the silicon-based quantum computers that Google and others are building. As of right now, it does. IonQ has constructed a quantum computer that can perform calculations on a 79-qubit array, beating the previous king Google’s efforts by 7 qubits.

Their error rates are also the best in the business, with their single-qubit error rate at 99.97% while the nearest competitors are around the 99.5 mark, and a two-qubit error rate of 99.3% when most competitors are beneath 95%. But how does it compare to regular computers?

According to IonQ, in the kinds of workloads that quantum computers are being built for, it’s already overtaking them. The Bernstein-Vazirani Algorithm, a benchmark IonQ is hoping will take off, tests a computer’s ability to determine a single encoded number (called an oracle) when the computer can only ask a single yes/no question.

This Could Be the Best Quantum Computer Yet

A startup based in Maryland has released and tested an impressive new quantum computer that demonstrates the power of an occasionally overlooked quantum computing architecture.

Companies like IBM, Google, and Rigetti are developing new kinds of computer processors that rely on the mathematics of subatomic particles to potentially perform calculations difficult for classical computers to do. These devices use superconductors as the basis for their qubits. A company called IonQ, however, has now announced a state-of-the-art system that relies on the quantum nature of atoms themselves, and it’s one of the best-performing quantum computers yet.

Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality – and its worrying sacrifices

Whether we will ever find a way to overcome the physiological trade offs that hold back immortality, or whether we will really be able to replicate human consciousness in a computer are questions too difficult for us yet to answer. But are those leading the charge against death at least inspiring us to lead healthy lives, or are they simply rallying against an inevitable fate?

Long read: How nature is fighting our attempts to use biohacking to live forever.

What Is Cloud Computing (Computing As A Utility)

This video is the tenth in a multi-part series discussing computing. In this video, we’ll be discussing what cloud computing is and the fundamental change it brings in how we view and think about computing.

[0:27–2:19] Starting off we’ll discuss, the revolution the cloud computing paradigm, computing as a utility, brings to the field of computing, and similar transformations seen when electricity became a utility.

[2:19–5:24] Following that we’ll discuss, what exactly cloud computing is and the types of cloud computing: Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), Platform As A Service (PaaS) and Software As A Service (SaaS) further extending to serverless architecture, Functions As A Service (FaaS).

New Intel Architectures and Technologies Target Expanded Market Opportunities

At Intel’s recent Architecture Day, Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president of Core and Visual Computing, outlined a strategic shift for the company’s design and engineering model. This shift combines a series of foundational building blocks that leverage a world-class portfolio of technologies and intellectual property (IP) within the company.

Architecture Day Fact Sheet: New Intel Architectures and Technologies Target Expanded Market Opportunities

This approach is designed to allow Intel to drive an accelerated pace of innovation and leadership, and will be anchored across six strategic pillars: