• COMPUTERS
    Artificial intelligence eats chess computers for lunch

    After 25 years of intermittent seriousness, I’m a mediocre tournament chess player. Grandmasters play at a level that beggars my comprehension. But grandmasters, since the second Clinton administration, have looked like clowns against chess computers. Now AlphaZero, a digital doohickey from DeepMind—Google’s AI operation—has made a fool of Stockfish, the strongest “traditional” chess program. Four […]

  • COMPUTERS
    ARTIFICIAL SYNAPSES COULD LEAD TO BRAINIER, SUPER-EFFICIENT COMPUTERS

    BRAINS, BEYOND THEIR signature achievements in thinking and problem solving, are paragons of energy efficiency. The human brain’s power consumption resembles that of a 20-watt incandescent lightbulb. In contrast, one of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers, the K computer in Kobe, Japan, consumes as much as 9.89 megawatts of energy—an amount roughly equivalent to the […]