MachineMachine / stream

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They constructed their networks in a simple way: if one board position can lead to another, they are connected. Using a dataset of about 1,000 professional games and 4,000 amateur…

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Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification…

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Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information…

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It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from…

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A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not…

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It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the…

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The arrow of time points in one direction only, from past to present to future. Now there's a fact—rather like Wittgenstein's observation "A is the same thing as A"—that is…

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A new technique for unpeeling the Earth’s skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out…

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Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt…

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician at Oxford University for most of his life. His fanciful “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”…