Software

Q&A: How to make computing more sustainable

Ask your computer or phone to translate a sentence from English to Italian. No problem, right? But this task is not as easy as it appears. The software behind your screen had to learn how to process hundreds of billions of ...

Computer Sciences

AI algorithm puts the color back in black and white films

Countless historical photographs are stored in black and white in the world's archives. Today, these cultural assets and contemporary documents are conserved by means of digitization and (partially) improved through digital ...

Computer Sciences

A new and better way to create word lists

Word lists are the basis of so much research in so many fields. Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub have now developed an algorithm that can be applied to different languages and can expand word lists significantly ...

Computer Sciences

Breakthrough enables perfectly secure digital communications

A group of researchers has achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden.

Machine learning & AI

Paper suggests AI could lead armies of the future onto battlefields

Published in The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, a Monash University led-paper suggests teams of humans under the control, supervision or command of artificial intelligences are likely to beat teams of human-controlled ...

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Algorithm

In mathematics, computing, linguistics, and related subjects, an algorithm is a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, often used for calculation and data processing. It is formally a type of effective method in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task, will when given an initial state, proceed through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in an end-state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as probabilistic algorithms, incorporate randomness.

A partial formalization of the concept began with attempts to solve the Entscheidungsproblem (the "decision problem") posed by David Hilbert in 1928. Subsequent formalizations were framed as attempts to define "effective calculability" (Kleene 1943:274) or "effective method" (Rosser 1939:225); those formalizations included the Gödel-Herbrand-Kleene recursive functions of 1930, 1934 and 1935, Alonzo Church's lambda calculus of 1936, Emil Post's "Formulation 1" of 1936, and Alan Turing's Turing machines of 1936–7 and 1939.

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