The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...

A computer science professor from Sweden has discovered an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in the Universal Turing Machine, one of the earliest computer designs in history. Pontus Johnson, a ...

Microsoft, which calls its Excel spreadsheet a programming language, reports that an effort called LAMBDA to make it even more of a programming language is paying off, recently being deemed Turing ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Busy Beaver number, or BB(n), represents a mathematical problem that tries to calculate the longest possible run-time of a Turing machine ...

Some of today’s most capable AI systems are refined versions of large language models (LLMs) that predict text on the basis ...