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Albert Einstein played a mean violin.

Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.

Cognitive psychologist and poet Keith Holyoak explores whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity.

Remember Stephen Hawking's robotic voice? It wasn’t a robot.

"It is almost impossible to put into words the difference that Alan Turing made to society."

With huge suites of data, we can extract plenty of signals where we know to look for them. Everything else? That’s where AI comes in. At the dawn of the 20th […]

The thinking behind Turing Machines and "universal systems," is being extended to build a new kind of physics. “Constructor Theory,” is being developed by David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto to better explain life. It even suggests why morality arose. 

It takes "deliberate practice," though, to increase your odds of attaining success.

"Humans are allergic to change,” Grace Hopper once said. “They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise."

Nature invented software billions of years before we did. “The origin of life is really the origin of software,” says Gregory Chaitin (inventor of mathematical metabiology). Life requires what software does. It is fundamentally algorithmic. And its complexity needs better thinking tools.

This past summer the British government indicated it would be moving forward to finally grant a pardon for Alan Turing, but not for the 49,000 other gay men, including Oscar Wilde, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act.

Not only is religion just as bad as an infectious disease, Mr. Dawkins also says it is a form of child abuse.

The top videos of summer, '12, featuring experts such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dr. Michio Kaku, Slavoj Zizek, Jaron Lanier and many others. 

Can the human mind be explained as a solely material thing? Can a machine ever be conscious?

Very often, the most creative things happen in the most implausible places, such as the creation of the first electronic digital computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. 

At the Washington Post Sunday, Old Dominion journalism professor and author Joyce Hoffmann reflected on the life and influence of journalist Theodore White, best known for his Pulitzer-prize winning The Making […]

Bringing philosophers into the corporation is not an entirely new idea. But in our new era of computational power the Philosopher-Kings will be determining how each of us lives, thinks and feels.