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GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone more...

“Cyclomatic complexity is computed using a graph that describes the control flow of the program. The nodes of the graph correspond to the commands of a program. A directed edge connects two nodes if the second command might be executed more...

A lesson I have learned the hard way is that we aren’t smart enough. Even the most brilliant programmers routinely make stupid mistakes. Not just typos, but basic design errors that back the code into a corner, and in retrospect more...

The Minority Game: an introductory guide

Reducing away objectively real and explanatorily powerful levels of abstractions is bad science. Computational thinking extracts lessons from software -- which is grounded in reality in a way that purely abstract disciplines like mathematics are not.

developed a convention in our AI work: when we ran into something we didn't understand, which was often, we would say "magic" - as in, "X magically does Y" - to remind ourselves that here was an unsolved problem, a more...

Global warming, the war on terror and rampant consumerism getting you down? Well, lighten up: here, 17 of the world's smartest scientists and academics share their reasons to be cheerful