Coordinating complicated interactive systems, whether it’s the different modes of transportation in a city or the various components that must work together to make an effective and efficient robot, is an increasingly important subject for software designers to tackle. Now, researchers at MIT have developed an entirely new way of approaching these complex problems, using simple diagrams as a tool to reveal better approaches to software optimization in deep-learning models. They say the new method makes addressing these complex tasks so simple that it can be reduced to a drawing that would fit on the back of a napkin. The new […]

When chemists design new chemical reactions, one useful piece of information involves the reaction’s transition state — the point of no return from which a reaction must proceed. This information allows chemists to try to produce the right conditions that will allow the desired reaction to occur. However, current methods for predicting the transition state and the path that a chemical reaction will take are complicated and require a huge amount of computational power. MIT researchers have now developed a machine-learning model that can make these predictions in less than a second, with high accuracy. Their model could make it […]

The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago.  I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things to read. Soon enough I wasn’t content to just read stuff on the internet—I wanted to make it. So I learned HTML and made a basic web page, and then a better web page, and then a whole website full of web things. And then […]