Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM are all racing to build a quantum computer. But the technology's feasibility is as hazy as its physics.

The true danger isn't just that quantum computers will read our emails. It's that they'll fundamentally change what's possible in the material world.

“There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns—things we do not yet realize we do not know.”—Donald Rumsfeld (2002) While modern machine learning (ML) ...

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks. For ...

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they’ll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can ...

Classical real-valued probabilities come at a philosophical cost: in many infinite situations, they assign the same probability value—namely, zero—to cases that are impossible as well as to cases that ...

The mathematician Daniel Litt has driven social media users to distraction with a series of simple-seeming but counterintuitive probability puzzles. In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent ...

When is it appropriate to completely reinvent the wheel? To an outsider, that seems to happen a lot in category theory, and probability theory isn’t spared from this treatment. We’ve had a useful ...

Once you have a basic understanding of sports betting odds, it’s easy to determine the favorite or underdog in a game and the favored option among a range of choices. You can also go a step further by ...