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computer science

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Modern computers wouldn't be possible without George Boole, who died before light bulbs even came on the market. We celebrate his 200th birthday with a look at the man and his work.

A closer look at one of the simplest quantum algorithms.

What will quantum computers be able to do that ordinary computers can't do?

What's stopping us from building useful quantum computers? And how long until we'll have them?

Here's a brief introduction to the possible future of computing.

Why it's hard to build quantum computers and what can be done about it.

Will computers ever replace human mathematicians?

When you transmit information long-distance there is always a chance that some of it gets mangled and arrives at the other end corrupted. Luckily, there are clever ways of encoding information which ensure a tiny error rate, even when your communication channel is prone to errors.

Computers represent information using bits — that's 0s and 1s. It turns out that Claude Shannon's entropy, a measure of information invented long before computers became mainstream, measures the minimal number of bits you need to encode a piece of information.

The human brain faces a difficult trade-off. On the one hand it needs to be complex to ensure high performance, and on the other it needs to minimise "wiring cost" — the sum of the length of all the connections — because communication over distance takes a lot of energy. It's a problem well-known to computer scientists. And it seems that market driven human invention and natural selection have come up with similar solutions.