New Scientist: A group at the University of Oxford has been working on a system to enable computers to understand human language, reports New Scientist‘s Jacob Aron. Currently, computers understand sentences only as bunches of words without structure. But Bob Coecke, a lecturer in quantum computer science, and his team used a form of graphical mathematics borrowed from quantum mechanics to encode language and grammar in a set of mathematical rules. The group’s work is to be published in the journal Linguistic Analysis and will be presented next month at the International Conference on Computational Semantics.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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