1+ day, 6+ hour ago  (500+ words) You make SFI possible In the last decade, a phenomenon in artificial intelligence known as "double descent" has surprised researchers who study learning. The expectation was that the best AI models were neither too simple nor too complex. But certain…...

3+ mon, 1+ week ago  (332+ words) But there's a tradeoff: That efficiency gain in neuromorphic chips comes at the cost of slower computing speed, says Shantanu Chakrabartty at Washington University in St. Louis. "We need to break this barrier," he says. "Ideally you want to get…...

3+ mon, 3+ week ago  (150+ words) SFI Research Fellow Anthony Eagan reflects on SFI's new multi-day event, Synthetic Imagination, which launched in September. This year's event, co-organized by Eagan and'SFI Director of Experimental Projects Caitlin Mc Shea, convened a series of presentations around the theme of…...

5+ mon, 3+ week ago  (410+ words) Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison builds mathematical tools to quantify and compare biological variation. Her work draws on ecology, population genetics, and information theory to study the structure, diversity, and stability of populations " whether those populations consist of species in…...

6+ mon, 2+ week ago  (462+ words) The human brain is remarkably good at detecting patterns in the world around us. We notice behaviors, rhythms, and recurrences, and often build analogies to explain them. But not all of these intuitive ideas about nature hold up under mathematical…...

7+ mon, 2+ day ago  (318+ words) Giambattista Vico, in his foundational treatise The New Science, argued that humans can only truly know that which we have made ourselves. Language, art, literature, religion " these cultural elements are how humanity best understands itself. Writing in 1725, Vico refuted the…...