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On 14 November 2023, NASA’s interstellar space probe Voyager 1 began sending gibberish back to Earth. For five months, the spacecraft transmitted unusable data equivalent to a dial tone. In March, engineers discovered the cause of the communication snafu: a stuck bit in one of the chips comprising part of Voyager’s onboard memory. The chip contained lines of code used by the flight data subsystem

Since ChatGPT dropped in the fall of 2022, everyone and their donkey has tried their hand at prompt engineering—finding a clever way to phrase their query to a large language model (LLM) or AI art or video generator to get the best results (or sidestep protections). The Internet is replete with prompt-engineering guides, cheat sheets, and advice threads to help you get the most out of an LLM. In t

Happy birthday, IBM! You’re 100 years old! Or are you? It’s true that the businesses that formed IBM began in the late 1800s. But it’s also true that a birth occurred in February 1924, with the renaming of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. as the International Business Machines Corp. And a hundred years after that event, it serves as an important reminder that the world of computing and IT th

The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe. That’s the message coming from a small but vocal set of prominent skeptics in and around the emerging quantum computing industry. Quantum computers have been touted as a solution to a wide range of problems, including financial modeling, optimizing logistics, and accelerating machine learning. S

On Wednesday, at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), in Detroit, a Disney Research team presented a brand new robotic character during their evening keynote address. The adorable robot packs an enormous amount of expression into its child-size body, from its highly expressive head and two wiggly antennae to its stubby little legs. But what sets this

What should we make of OpenAI’s GPT-4, anyway? Is the large language model a major step on the way to an artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the insider’s term for an AI system with a flexible human-level intellect? And if we do create an AGI, might it be so different from human intelligence that it doesn’t see the point of keeping Homo sapiens around? If you query the world’s best minds on basi

First-year college students are understandably frustrated when they can’t get into popular upper-level electives. But they usually just gripe. Paras Jha was an exception. Enraged that upper-class students were given priority to enroll in a computer-science elective at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Paras decided to crash the registration website so that no one could enroll. On Wednes

Andrew Ng has serious street cred in artificial intelligence. He pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to train deep learning models in the late 2000s with his students at Stanford University, cofounded Google Brain in 2011, and then served for three years as chief scientist for Baidu, where he helped build the Chinese tech giant’s AI group. So when he says he has identified the ne

“Causality is very important for the next steps of progress of machine learning,” said Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award-wining scientist known for his work in deep learning, in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in 2019. So far, deep learning has comprised learning from static datasets, which makes AI really good at tasks related to correlations and associations. However, neural nets do not interpret ca

Welcome to IEEE Spectrum’s 11th annual rankings of the most popular programming languages. As always, we combine multiple metrics from different sources to create three meta rankings. The “Spectrum” ranking is weighted towards the profile of the typical IEEE member, the “Trending” ranking seeks to spot languages that are in the zeitgeist, and the “Jobs” ranking measures what employers are looking

Support IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication of the IEEE — the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences. Our articles, podcasts, and infographics inform our readers about developments in technology, engineering, and science.

Over the last 10 years, the PR2 has helped roboticists make an enormous amount of progress in mobile manipulation over a relatively short time. I mean, it’s been a decade already, but still—robots are hard, and giving a bunch of smart people access to a capable platform where they didn’t have to worry about hardware and could instead focus on doing interesting and useful things helped to establish

When we’ve written about adding useful robotic bits to people in the past, whether it’s some extra fingers or an additional arm or two, the functionality has generally been limited to slow moving, lightweight tasks. Holding or carrying things. Stabilizing objects or the user. That sort of thing. But that’s not what we want. What we want are wearable robotic arms that turn us into a superhero, like

Imagine this scene: It's nearly dinnertime, and little Jimmy is in the kitchen. His mom is rushing to get dinner on the table, and she puts all the silverware in a pile on the counter. Jimmy, who's on the autism spectrum, wants the silverware to be more orderly, and while his mom is at the stove he carefully begins to put each fork, knife, and spoon back in its slot in the silverware drawer. Sudde

The world's first programming language based on classical Chinese is only about a month old, and volunteers have already written dozens of programs with it, such as one based on an ancient Chinese fortune-telling algorithm. The new language's developer, Lingdong Huang, previously designed an infinite computer-generated Chinese landscape painting. He also helped create the first and so far only AI-

Welcome to IEEE Spectrum's sixth annual interactive ranking of the top programming languages. This year we've done a major overhaul, changing some of the underlying metrics and building a new streamlined interface. But our basic idea and methodology remains the same: combining data from multiple sources to rank the popularity of the programming languages that are used for the type of coding you ar

In 2014, IBM opened swanky new headquarters for its artificial intelligence division, known as IBM Watson. Inside the glassy tower in lower Manhattan, IBMers can bring prospective clients and visiting journalists into the “immersion room,” which resembles a miniature planetarium. There, in the darkened space, visitors sit on swiveling stools while fancy graphics flash around the curved screens cov

UPDATE: 3 Feb. 2024: In the wake of a near-disastrous cabin blowout in an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 on 5 Jan.—which has propelled the embattled redesign of the once iconic 737 back into the headlines—Boeing, the plane’s designer, has been shaken anew. As the Financial Timesreported on 31 Jan., the company’s chief executive Dave Calhoun wrote in a note to employees that outsourcing in the 737 Max d

Humanoid robots have a very distinctive walk. Knees bent, torso as stationary as possible. Even Boston Dynamics’ own Atlas uses this crouching sort of squat-walk to get around, because those perpetually bent legs are how it keeps from falling over. This sort of gait is so common with humanoid robots that it’s become the “normal” robot gait, but it’s also not at all the way that humans walk. We wal

Quantum computing could someday supercharge artificial intelligence, accelerate drug discovery, and even reduce traffic jams. But existing quantum computers, which have only a modest, if any, advantage over their classical brethren, are expensive, finicky beasts. Even if you could afford the US $15 million to buy a D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer [PDF], for example, you would need experts to maintai