Theoretical physicists use machine-learning algorithms to speed up difficult calculations and eliminate untenable theories—but could they transform what it means to make discoveries? Theoretical ...

Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the ...

In the machine learning world, the sizes of artificial neural networks — and their outsize successes — are creating conceptual conundrums. When a network named AlexNet won an annual image recognition ...