Mathematics & Logic
Learning by reward
Nobody tells the learner the right answer, only how well it did. How that one number teaches, and where it misleads.
- 9min read
- 29questions
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EdenMind is a flashcard app you answer out loud.
Your phone marks what you say and brings each question back just before you’d forget it, so you remember what you read. Your voice never leaves the phone.
Mathematics & Logic
Learning with no one to mark the answers
Labels are slow and costly to make. So machines learned to set their own questions: group what is alike, rebuild what was squeezed, guess what was hidden.
- 8min read
- 26questions
Mathematics & Logic
How much is a surprise worth?
Information is measured by how much a message surprises you, and a machine that learns to be less surprised by text learns a great deal about it.
- 9min read
- 31questions
Mathematics & Logic
Changing your mind by the numbers
Start from what you already knew, weigh the new clue, and end up exactly as sure as the evidence allows.
- 9min read
- 28questions
Mathematics & Logic
Thinking in lists of numbers
Vectors and matrices, the school maths that search engines, recommendations and every neural network quietly run on.
- 8min read
- 29questions
Psychology
When famous findings fall apart
Some of the best-known stories about the mind met the simplest test in science: doing the study again.
- 9min read
- 30questions
Psychology
What really happened in the Stanford prison
One of psychology's most famous lessons says a uniform can make a good person cruel. The full story is stranger, and it hands the responsibility back to the person.
- 8min read
- 27questions
Psychology
The two speeds of thought
One kind of thinking answers at once; the other checks, if it can be bothered.
- 9min read
- 31questions
Society
Why prices rise
When nearly everything in the shop costs more, the goods haven't changed. The money has, because each unit of it now buys less.
- 8min read
- 30questions
Chemistry
How soap cleans
Water alone can't lift grease or break open a flu virus. Soap does both, with a molecule that holds water at one end and grease at the other, and Nablus made it from olive oil and plant ash for centuries.
- 7min read
- 26questions
Physics
The search for a steady beat
Every clock is something that repeats at a steady pace, plus a way to count the repeats. The rest of the story is the hunt for something steadier.
- 9min read
- 31questions
Biology
How animals find their way
Every navigator needs a compass and a map. A young bird is born with its heading, but its map comes from experience.
- 8min read
- 29questions
Psychology
How habits work
Repeat an action in the same place often enough, and the place starts doing it for you.
- 8min read
- 27questions
Mathematics & Logic
Secret codes
A cipher hides a message's letters but not its patterns, and the patterns are what give it away.
- 8min read
- 29questions
Mathematics & Logic
Transformers
Attention, next-word prediction and scale — and the gap between sounding right and being right.
- 9min read
- 30questions
Mathematics & Logic
Deep learning
Nobody writes the rules. A network of simple calculations tunes itself on examples until its answers come out right.
- 8min read
- 33questions
Mathematics & Logic
The bitter lesson
Seventy years of AI research, one uncomfortable pattern: methods that scale with computing beat methods built on what we know.
- 7min read
- 24questions
Society
The medium is the message
Why a light bulb, a printing press and a television screen change people, whatever they carry.
- 8min read
- 27questions
Physics
Ibn al-Haytham
Lamps in a dark room, a tube on a ruler and a book of doubts — how one scholar rebuilt the science of sight.
- 8min read
- 25questions
Psychology
The testing effect
We think of a test as a way to measure learning. Done well, it is one of the best ways to cause it.
- 6min read
- 21questions
Psychology
Spaced repetition
Memory fades along a curve. Coming back at the right moments bends it.
- 7min read
- 20questions
Biology
The cell
The smallest thing that counts as alive — and the tiny machinery packed inside it.
- 8min read
- 31questions
