#abstractions

opensciencedaily@diasp.org

How Do You Prove a Secret?


Imagine you had some useful knowledge — maybe a secret recipe, or the key to a cipher. Could you prove to a friend that you had that knowledge, without revealing anything about it? Computer scientists proved over 30 years ago that you could, if you used what’s called a zero-knowledge proof. For a simple way to understand this idea, let’s suppose you want to show your friend that you know how to...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-prove-you-know-a-secret-without-giving-it-away-20221011/
#computer, #science, #abstractions, #blog


opensciencedaily@diasp.org

Researchers Gain New Understanding From Simple AI


In the last two years, artificial intelligence programs have reached a surprising level of linguistic fluency. The biggest and best of these are all based on an architecture invented in 2017 called the transformer. It serves as a kind of blueprint for the programs to follow, in the form of a list of equations. But beyond this bare mathematical outline, we don’t really know what transformers are...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-glimpse-how-ai-gets-so-good-at-language-processing-20220414/
#abstractions, #blog, #science, #computer


opensciencedaily@diasp.org

The Mysterious Forces Inside the Nucleus Grow a Little Less Strange


Billions of times each minute, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashes protons together, unleashing a maelstrom of energy that crystallizes into more protons, neutrons, and less familiar cousins of the nuclear particles. Some particles encounter each other as they flee the scene. What happens next — whether a given pair pulls together or pushes apart — physicists generally can’t say.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/colliders-and-supercomputers-force-fresh-hints-in-quark-mystery-20220214/
#blog, #physics, #abstractions


opensciencedaily@diasp.org

Computer Scientists Prove Why Bigger Neural Networks Do Better


Our species owes a lot to opposable thumbs. But if evolution had given us extra thumbs, things probably wouldn’t have improved much. One thumb per hand is enough. Not so for neural networks, the leading artificial intelligence systems for performing humanlike tasks. As they’ve gotten bigger, they have come to grasp more. This has been a surprise to onlookers. Fundamental mathematical results had...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-prove-why-bigger-neural-networks-do-better-20220210/
#science, #mathematics, #abstractions, #computer, #blog