Related papers: Reprogramming Matter, Life, and Purpose
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently become a real formal science: the new millennium brought the first mathematically sound, asymptotically optimal, universal problem solvers, providing a new, rigorous foundation for the previously…
One of the central aims of neuroscience is to reliably predict the behavioral response of an organism using its neural activity. If possible, this implies we can causally manipulate the neural response and design brain-computer-interface…
The social and economic importance of large bodies of programs and data that are potentially long-lived has attracted much attention in the commercial and research communities. Here we concentrate on a set of methodologies and technologies…
Popular culture has contemplated societies of thinking machines for generations, envisioning futures from utopian to dystopian. These futures are, arguably, here now-we find ourselves at the doorstep of technology that can at least simulate…
We live in momentous times. The science community is empowered with an arsenal of cosmic messengers to study the Universe in unprecedented detail. Gravitational waves, electromagnetic waves, neutrinos and cosmic rays cover a wide range of…
The human ability to repurpose objects and processes is universal, but it is not a well-understood aspect of human intelligence. Repurposing arises in everyday situations such as finding substitutes for missing ingredients when cooking, or…
Rather than an a priori arena in which events take place, space-time is a construction of our mind making possible a particular kind of ordering of events. As quantum entanglement is a property of states independent of classical distances,…
The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) technologies upon society, and their potential to fundamentally shape the future evolution of humankind, are topics very much at the forefront of current scientific,…
In the last few decades, reading the literature, we realized that we Astronomers have a strong preference to undertake very ambitious projects, and search for answers to the most fundamental questions in the history of the entire Universe.…
Software is a field of rapid changes: the best technology today becomes obsolete in the near future. If we review the graduate attributes of any of the software engineering programs across the world, life-long learning is one of them. The…
The apparent fine-tuning of several fundamental parameters that determine the properties of our Universe and make it hospitable to life is sometimes used as an argument for God from design. I review the concept of cosmic fine-tuning and…
Time, space, and matter are categories of our reasoning, whose properties appear to be fundamental. However, these require a scrutiny as in the extreme regime of the primordial universe these present quantum properties. What does it mean…
Over the last decade, the use of robots in production and daily life has increased. With increasingly complex tasks and interaction in different environments including humans, robots are required a higher level of autonomy for efficient…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
Particle accelerators and their detectors are the world's most powerful microscopes. They enable us to inspect the constituents of matter at attometer scales, study matter under unusual conditions, and concentrate extraordinary amounts of…
The world has seen the emergence of machines based on pretrained models, transformers, also known as generative artificial intelligences for their ability to produce various types of content, including text, images, audio, and synthetic…
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will transform many aspects of our lives and society, bringing immense opportunities but also posing significant risks and challenges. The next several decades may well be a turning point for…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
In the half century since the 1950s computer simulation has transformed our understanding of physics. The rare, expensive, slow, and bulky mainframes of World War II have given way to today's millions of cheap, fast, desksized workstations…
In this overview article we will consider the deliberate restarting of algorithms, a meta technique, in order to improve the algorithm's performance, e.g., convergence rates or approximation guarantees. One of the major advantages is that…