In the 1960s an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created a chatbot called ELIZA. The conversations people had with it set precedents for the chatbots to come.

A new book claims AI has been built on a flawed assumption dating back to Alan Turing's famous 1950 paper. Peter J. Denning argues that the most important parts of human intelligence, including common ...

Studying the epic journey of the iconic jumping plumber can lead to new insights in theoretical computer science—and may help researchers understand the tractability of problems in other areas.

Criticism is not uncommon in the aftermath of a literary prize announcement. But the uproar after the British literary magazine Granta announced the regional winners of its annual short story prize ...

Everyone knows the CAPCHA tests on websites where you either have to click on numerous pictures of cars, traffic lights, or bicycles, enter confusing combinations of numbers and letters or simply ...

In 2025, the edges of mathematics came a little more sharply into view when members of the online Busy Beaver Challenge community closed in on a huge number that threatens to defy the logical ...

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Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and — wait for it — 47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. These are the first five busy ...

Artificial intelligence has become increasingly influential, but its conceptual foundations were established decades before the digital age. To create a machine that works and thinks just like humans ...

Today mathematician Alan Turing is world-famous because he helped the Allies achieve victory against the Axis powers by deciphering an encryption that was considered unbreakable. That story inspired ...

Before the term artificial intelligence was coined in 1955, there were glimmers of AI’s potential in folklore, fiction, and the early engineering feats of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These ...