SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG).

Some computers are easy to spot. Artificial, human-built computers like those found in smartphones and laptops are abstract ...

The race to develop a virtual scientist — an AI creation that conducts every stage of research, from idea to publication — has consumed researchers, start-up founders, and tech juggernauts alike. It ...

Whenever an authority has influence over a population — be it a social media platform moderating user comments, a government imposing laws on its citizens, or an employer placing restrictions on ...

In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert, SFI Fractal Faculty member Carlo Rovelli, and physicist Jordan Scharnhorst examine a long-standing, paradoxical thought experiment in statistical ...

The human brain is astonishingly efficient. It runs on about 20 watts, roughly the power required to keep a dim bulb lit. Over the last three decades, computer scientists in a field called ...

03/10/2026 Colloquium "The Great Holocene Transformation: Cultural Macroevolution of Social Scale and Complexity" by Peter Turchin, Complexity Science Hub Vienna 01/07 — 01/09 Working Group ...

Every task we perform on our computer — whether number crunching, watching a video, or typing out an article — requires different components of the machine to interact with one another. "Communication ...

Since the origins of modern philosophy and poetry, imagination has been a technical term for the human ability to cognize in images and thought combinations that reconfigure our memories or immediate ...

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it ...

From Beowulf to Pride and Prejudice to the classic sitcom Friends, all stories share a common purpose: to convey knowledge about how to navigate the world. “Stories are everywhere,” says SFI External ...

In his biography of Elon Musk, historian Walter Isaacson describes a game of Texas Hold ‘Em poker in which Musk went all in — on every hand. “Isaacson uses the anecdote to show that Elon Musk is a ...