Technology47
Algorithms, neural networks and artificial intelligence: how the technology you use every day works, explained from the ground up.
- ASCII Table: What Is It? The ASCII table assigns a fixed number to every letter, digit, punctuation mark, and keyboard control command, so that a computer, which only handles numbers, can represent text. Published in 1963 by the ANSI X3.4 committee and adopted for U.S. federal computers in 1968, it uses 7 bits and covers 128 characters, almost all of them from the English alphabet, according to the IEEE's Engineering and Technology History Wiki. RFC 20 shows how those 7 bits fit neatly inside an 8-bit byte, with the highest bit left unused; putting that extra bit to work opens up more combinations, the basis for the variants known as Extended ASCII. Because it only covers English, though, standard ASCII falls short for languages with accents, ideograms, or other alphabets — a gap Unicode was built to close.
- Binary Code: What It Is and How Computers Write Numbers Binary code is how a computer represents numbers using only two digits, 0 and 1. The reason is physical: a computer's circuits reliably tell apart only two electrical states, current off or current on, and we label them 0 and 1 for convenience. Just like the decimal system, each digit's value depends on its position, but here positions are worth powers of two instead of powers of ten: the number 101 works out to (1×4)+(0×2)+(1×1), which is 5. Eight of these digits together form a byte, the unit a computer typically uses to hold one number. Binary alone covers numbers; writing letters needs an extra convention, such as ASCII or Unicode, covered in their own Recaps.
- Unicode: What Is It? How It Replaced ASCII Unicode is the standard that gives a unique number, called a code point, to every character in every written language. It replaced ASCII, the 1963 code whose 128 characters covered only the English alphabet, with no accents and no other scripts. Text online travels almost always as UTF-8, one of the forms Unicode uses to turn those numbers into bytes, and it's backward compatible: a file written purely in ASCII is already valid UTF-8. Version 18.0 of the standard, published in September 2026, covers 172,808 characters.
- Von Neumann Architecture: How a Computer Works, Explained The von Neumann architecture is the model behind most computers, from laptops to smartphones: memory and processor are connected by a single bus that carries both data and program instructions. The idea comes from John von Neumann's report on the EDVAC, published in 1945, which gave the architecture its name. That simplicity has a cost, known as the von Neumann bottleneck: the slowdown that happens when data and instructions have to travel the same path, one at a time. An alternative exists, the Harvard architecture, which keeps the two paths separate; but for general-purpose computing, von Neumann's model remains the one most widely used.
- Local Transportation While Traveling: How to Pick the Right Option Arriving somewhere unfamiliar always raises the same question: which way of getting around actually fits the trip. Buses and subways cost the least but ask you to figure out lines and tickets on the spot; taxis and ride-sharing apps are more convenient but reward a few checks before you get in; renting a car only pays off in specific situations. The gap between a smooth trip and a stressful one usually comes down to a handful of things verified in advance: cost, safety, time on hand and how far you actually need to go.
- AI Pop Culture: When Synthetic Content Rewrites History According to Lead Stories, a World War Two photo held by the Imperial War Museums circulated in 2026 in an AI-colorized version that a detector rated 99% likely to be artificially generated, even though the original shot was genuine. Cases like this also touch pop culture and current events: text, image and video models produce content that looks historical or iconic without actually being so, or alter real content in details that are hard to spot at a glance. Some tools leave technical clues, such as digital watermarks or video length limits, but no single clue covers every generator on the market. The Reuters Institute reports that in 2026 trust in AI chatbot answers about the news stays low, at 20% against 37% for news overall. Checking whether an image or video is authentic still means comparing it against the original archive that holds it.
- eSIM: what is it and how does it work for travel An eSIM is a digital SIM built into a phone: it turns on with a QR code or an app, with nothing to insert or remove. It's convenient for travel because a data plan can be activated remotely, but the phone needs a Wi-Fi connection to finish the setup. Inside the European Union, though, a traveler's home operator already includes roaming at domestic rates since 2017: the eSIM vs local SIM choice mostly matters outside that area, where roaming can get expensive.
- Offline Maps: Getting Around and Translating Without a Connection An offline map is a chunk of the map your phone stores locally before you leave, so navigation keeps working even without mobile data or Wi-Fi. Google Maps, the app most people search for, lets you download an area and drive it, but with sharp limits worth knowing before you rely on it mid-trip. Apple Maps and alternatives such as Organic Maps handle offline coverage differently, while Waze is the outlier: it has no real offline mode. Translation works the same way in advance, through Google Translate's downloadable language packs.
- Echo Chamber: How Recommendation Algorithms Shape What You See An echo chamber is an environment, online or offline, where a person mostly encounters opinions that confirm their own. Recommendation algorithms can build a narrower version of this, often called a filter bubble, by quietly deciding what to show someone based on what they've clicked and watched before. The two ideas get mixed up constantly, but they aren't the same phenomenon, and the strongest research available paints a more mixed picture than the popular narrative: algorithms have a measurable but modest effect, and people's own choices matter more. Whether algorithms actually drive political polarization is not something the most rigorous experiments have settled.
- Virtual influencers: the AI-made creators behind the profiles Virtual influencers are digital characters built by an agency or studio, complete with a face, a voice and a biography, who post on social media the way a real creator would. The phenomenon predates the generative-AI boom: Lil Miquela's account has been live since April 23, 2016, and Shudu Gram first appeared on April 22, 2017. Some of these profiles work with major brands: Miquela has partnered with Calvin Klein and Prada, while the Spanish agency The Clueless built Aitana López after finding human models and influencers too unreliable to manage. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission updated its advertising rules in 2023 to explicitly cover virtual influencers among the content that must be disclosed as sponsored.
- SEO, AEO and GEO: What Are They? SEO, AEO and GEO are three acronyms for three different ways of getting found online. SEO, Search Engine Optimization, works to get a page to rank higher in a traditional list of search results. AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, aims at a different target: appearing directly inside an answer, such as a voice reply or an answer box, with no click required. GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is the newest of the three and covers visibility inside the text an AI system generates when it summarizes a topic. Google itself says the fundamentals of SEO still hold for showing up in its AI-powered search features.
- Blockchain: What It Is and How It Works Blockchain is a digital ledger split into blocks that link together through cryptographic hashes, kept by many computers instead of one central authority. NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) describes it as tamper-resistant, because each block carries the fingerprint of the one before it. Getting a new block onto the chain requires agreement, and different networks reach that agreement differently: Bitcoin relies on the proof of work laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper, while Ethereum switched to proof of stake in 2022. The technology started with Bitcoin but now also underpins smart contracts, supply-chain tracking and business-to-business transactions.
- Elon Musk: The History of Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal and the Companies Behind Them Elon Musk built his fortune one company at a time. Selling Zip2 to Compaq in 1999 gave him his first real capital, which he poured into X.com, the online bank that became PayPal. In 2002 he founded SpaceX, and around the same time he became an investor in Tesla, only taking over as CEO in 2008. Neuralink, The Boring Company and, from 2022, ownership of Twitter (renamed X in 2023) followed in the years after. SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in June 2026 in one of the largest initial public offerings on record, and by September of that year Forbes put his net worth at roughly $886 billion.
- Artificial Superintelligence: What It Means, and Why Experts Disagree Artificial superintelligence (ASI) is the hypothesis of an AI that would outperform humans across every cognitive domain, a step beyond AGI, which only aims to match people at most jobs. In October 2025, hundreds of scientists, including Yoshua Bengio, signed a Future of Life Institute statement calling for a halt to its development until there is scientific agreement it can be done safely. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues the opposite case, that AI at this level could compress decades of medical progress into a few years. Nobody agrees on timing: estimates range from a lab CEO's early guess to a survey of nearly 2,800 researchers that puts 2047 as the median for an intermediate milestone.
- Foldable Smartphones: How the Hinge and Screen Really Work Foldable smartphones pair a flexible screen with an intricate mechanical hinge, and in 2026 Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold8 shows both the strengths and the limits of the category clearly. The Armor FlexHinge and Flex Titanium display have reached a genuinely refined level of engineering, but an independent iFixit teardown found that fine dust can still jam the mechanism despite the phone's stated IP48 rating. The crease down the middle of the screen remains a defining trait of the category, showing up within days on some units and barely noticeable on others after months of use. Globally, foldables are still a niche: 2.5% of smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2025, though growing.
- History of Amazon and Jeff Bezos: From Garage Startup to Antitrust Case Amazon started in 1994 in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, as an online bookstore called Cadabra before taking the name it has kept ever since. It grew fast, went public in 1997, nearly collapsed during the dot-com crash between 1999 and 2001, then expanded well beyond books until Amazon Web Services turned it into a cloud computing giant too. Founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, in a personal deal. Since 2023 the company has also faced an FTC monopoly lawsuit and, since 2024, a US Senate investigation into warehouse conditions.
- History of Apple and Steve Jobs, from the Garage to His Return as CEO Apple starts on April 1, 1976, in a garage in Los Altos, founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, who leaves the partnership after only twelve days. In 1985 Jobs himself leaves the company after a clash with then-CEO John Sculley, and over the following decade he founds NeXT and buys Pixar, the studio behind the 1995 hit Toy Story. Apple acquires NeXT between late 1996 and early 1997, bringing Jobs back to the company he had founded. Under his leadership Apple launches the iMac in 1998, the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007, before his death in 2011.
- Smartphone Battery Life: How to Make It Last Longer A phone battery wears out gradually with use, it doesn't fail all at once: every full charge counts as one cycle, and the capacity it can hold drops a little with each one. Heat is the real culprit, and it damages the battery permanently in a way cold never does. Topping up often, instead of waiting for the battery to hit zero, helps it last longer, and modern phones already manage charging for you in the background. Not every tip that circulates online holds up, either — closing apps manually does far less than most people assume.
- How Does an Aircraft Carrier Work? Flight Deck, Catapults and Nuclear Power An aircraft carrier is a warship built to launch and land aircraft in the middle of the ocean, turning its deck into a floating airport runway. Since the first one, the British HMS Argus, entered service in 1918, aircraft carriers have become among the most important warships in the world's navies. Some, like the American Nimitz class, use catapults and arresting wires; others, like the Italian Cavour, rely on an angled ramp and aircraft built for short takeoff or vertical landing. Below deck, between the hangar and the crew quarters, a single ship can house thousands of people.
- How the internet works: the journey of data from cable to page The internet is a network of networks: independent networks — homes, schools, companies, carriers — that can talk to each other because they agreed on the same rules, the protocols. Anything you send is broken into packets, each carrying the address of its destination, and routers bounce them from network to network until they arrive. DNS translates the names we remember into the numeric addresses machines actually use, and underneath it all run physical cables, most of them lying on the ocean floor.
- What is JavaScript? The language that outgrew the browser JavaScript is a lightweight, dynamically typed programming language with first-class functions, defined by MDN as interpreted or compiled just in time. Brendan Eich wrote it for Netscape in 1995, first appearing as 'LiveScript' in the September beta before being renamed JavaScript for the official release in December. It's best known as the scripting language of the web browser, but it runs outside the browser too, ever since Node.js made it possible to power a server as well. The specification behind it is called ECMAScript, maintained by the TC39 committee, and according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey it remains the single most used programming language.
- Power bank on a plane: the rules for carrying and using it safely Power banks and other spare lithium batteries must always travel in carry-on luggage, never in a checked suitcase: it's the rule shared by the FAA, TSA, IATA and EASA. The limit depends on the battery's capacity, measured in watt-hours (Wh): up to 100 Wh you can fly with no permission, between 101 and 160 Wh you need the airline's approval and can carry at most two spare batteries in that range, and above 160 Wh the power bank stays on the ground. The reason is technical, not bureaucratic: if a lithium battery overheats (a phenomenon called thermal runaway), the crew can act immediately only if the device is visible, in the cabin, not if it's sealed away in the hold or an overhead bin. After an Air Busan plane caught fire in January 2025, ignited by a power bank stored above passengers' heads, several Asian airlines added stricter rules on in-flight use. Individual airline rules keep changing, so it's always worth checking them before you travel.
- What Is TypeScript? Inside Microsoft's Typed Superset of JavaScript TypeScript is a programming language that adds a syntax for types on top of JavaScript: a typed superset, developed by Microsoft and led by Anders Hejlsberg, previously the lead architect of C#. It was built to handle large-scale JavaScript applications, where the lack of static checks can hide bugs. Developers write optional type annotations, then the tsc compiler checks the types and converts everything into standard JavaScript, runnable anywhere JavaScript runs: the types get stripped out and don't exist at runtime. It debuted publicly on October 1, 2012, and according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 43.6% of developers use it; by August 2025 it had also become the most used language on GitHub by monthly contributors, overtaking Python.
- Human Cognition vs. AI: What the Science Really Shows A human brain and a modern large language model (LLM) process information in profoundly different ways: people learn from a handful of examples by following structured principles, while LLMs absorb statistical patterns from enormous amounts of text. Models trained only on text lack direct experience of the physical world, and their reasoning can be far shakier than a human's when a question is only slightly reworded. Whether a system like this could ever be conscious is a question science still can't answer: as of 2026, the debate remains genuinely unresolved.
- Manual vs. Automatic Transmission: How Each One Really Works A manual transmission uses a disc clutch and gears that the driver engages by hand, while a traditional automatic shifts on its own using a hydraulic torque converter and planetary gear sets controlled by a computer. Newer designs have joined those two classic layouts: the dual-clutch transmission (DCT, badged DSG at Volkswagen) and the belt-driven CVT, which does away with fixed gears altogether. Until around 2010-2012 manuals used less fuel; since then automatics have taken the lead, mostly thanks to having more gear ratios. In the United States the manual gearbox has nearly vanished from new cars, while in Europe it remains a common choice.
- What is vibe coding? Meaning, origin and security risks Vibe coding is a way of programming where you describe, in speech or writing and in plain language, the result you want, and let an artificial intelligence model write (and often run) the code for you, accepting its output with little or no review. Andrej Karpathy coined the term on 2 February 2025, and it caught on so widely that Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year 2025. It's distinct from simply using an AI assistant to complete code you already understand: in vibe coding, by the original definition, you stop reading the diffs line by line. Several independent studies report that this way of working raises the risk of security vulnerabilities and leaked credentials in the resulting code.
- Artificial intelligence: what it is and how it's changing the world Artificial intelligence is, in the OECD's official definition updated in 2023, a system that infers from the data it receives how to generate predictions, content, recommendations or decisions for a given objective - rather than simply carrying out instructions written in advance, the way traditional software does. Very different forms live under this label: hand-coded rule-based systems, machine learning that learns from data, the deep neural networks of deep learning, and generative AI that writes text and creates images. The most recent data - from the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded thanks to AlphaFold to the 2026 Stanford HAI and Pew Research surveys - show a change that's already measurable in work, science, medicine and everyday life, almost never for a single reason.
- Clean Junk Files from PC and Mac: Free Up Disk Space Every PC and every Mac quietly fills up with files nobody uses anymore: app and browser caches, temporary files, leftovers from system updates, forgotten downloads. Windows and macOS both include built-in tools to clean the disk without installing any third-party software: on Windows they're called Disk Cleanup and Storage Sense, on Mac it's the Storage panel with three optimization recommendations you can turn on one by one. Using them well means knowing exactly what they delete, and on Windows also which folder is best left alone right after an update.
- Developer Options: How to Enable Them on Android, iPhone, and Your Browser Developer options are a panel of advanced settings, hidden by default, meant for people who build or test an app rather than for everyday use. On Android it unlocks by tapping the build number seven times in the phone's system information, until a confirmation message appears. On iPhone and iPad the same feature is called Developer Mode, introduced with iOS 16 in 2022, and it needs a restart plus an explicit confirmation before it actually turns on. Browsers hide their own equivalent too: Safari keeps its Develop menu switched off by default in Advanced settings, while Chrome and Firefox open their respective tools with a keyboard shortcut or from the main menu.
- History of Computers: A Timeline from Babbage to the Web The history of computers begins with mechanical calculating machines designed in the nineteenth century and moves, within about a hundred years, through the first electronic calculators of the Second World War, the invention of the transistor, and the birth of the microprocessor, all the way to the personal computers of the 1980s and the arrival of the web. There is no single inventor and no single birthdate: each stage grew out of the work of different people, often in parallel, in different labs and different countries. The thread running through all of it is miniaturization, machines the size of entire rooms shrinking down to devices that fit on a desk, then in the palm of a hand. This Recap traces the main milestones, from Charles Babbage's hand calculations to Tim Berners-Lee's proposal at CERN in 1989.
- History of Linux: from Torvalds' Kernel to Distributions, Summary Linux is a kernel, the core piece of software that lets a computer talk to its own hardware: it started in 1991 as the personal project of a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds. A kernel alone isn't enough to run a computer, though, it also needs system tools, most of which came from Richard Stallman's GNU project, launched in 1983. Putting those two pieces together produced complete operating systems, distributed in many different versions called distributions, from Debian to Ubuntu. The Linux kernel now sits at the base of most web servers, every single one of the world's fastest supercomputers, and, inside Android, billions of smartphones.
- The History of Mac OS and macOS: System 1, NeXTSTEP and Apple Silicon The first Macintosh launched on January 24, 1984, running an operating system that could handle only one application at a time, System 1.0. For fifteen years Apple kept updating it piece by piece, all the way to Mac OS 9, while chasing an internal overhaul project called Copland that never landed. The breakthrough came from the company's own founder: in 1997 Apple bought back NeXT, the company Steve Jobs had started after leaving in 1985, inheriting its NeXTSTEP technology, which became the foundation of Mac OS X in 2001. From there the Mac's operating system went through two more processor architecture changes, from PowerPC to Intel and then from Intel to Apple Silicon, and in 2025 it even changed the way its versions are numbered.
- The History of the Internet: From ARPANET to the World Wide Web The internet began in the 1960s as a research project funded by the US military, meant to connect the computers of American universities. In September 1969 the first node of ARPANET, the network it all started from, went live; during the 1970s Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn designed TCP/IP, the protocols that let different networks understand each other, which became the single standard on January 1, 1983. In 1989 researcher Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN, the service of linked pages that people often confuse with the internet itself, when it's really just one application running on top of it. In 2025, according to the ITU, about 6 billion people worldwide used the internet to communicate, learn, work and be entertained.
- How air fryers work (and why they don't really fry anything) An air fryer is, mechanically speaking, a small forced-convection oven: a heating element warms the air, and a powerful fan pushes it around the food at high speed inside a perforated basket. The result mimics deep frying in hot oil, but needs only a light coating of fat instead of full immersion. The browning comes from the same chemical reaction as traditional frying, the Maillard reaction, triggered once the food's surface passes roughly 140-165°C. Compared with deep frying, the appliance cuts fat intake and some unwanted compounds like acrylamide by a wide margin, but it doesn't eliminate them.
- How ATMs Work: From Card Insertion to Cash in Hand An ATM is not one machine but several working together: a card reader, a shielded keypad, a cash dispenser, and a vault, all coordinated to recognize you and check your PIN. That PIN never travels in the clear — it gets encrypted the instant you type it, by a dedicated device, before the machine 'calls' your bank over a shared international messaging standard called ISO 8583 to ask for approval. Nobody invented the cash machine on their own: rival versions surfaced within weeks of each other in different countries between the late 1960s and early 1970s. The EMV chip standard and hardware encryption make withdrawals far safer than they once were, but fraud like skimming and card trapping hasn't gone away.
- How microwave ovens work, and why they don't make food radioactive A microwave oven heats food with a component called a magnetron, which generates high-power radio waves strong enough to make water molecules vibrate. That vibration produces heat through friction, not through a flame or a heating element. The effect was discovered by accident in 1945 by Percy Spencer, a Raytheon engineer, after a candy bar melted in his pocket while he stood near a running magnetron. The oven's metal interior walls bounce the microwaves back toward the food like a mirror, while an isolated piece of metal inside can throw off sparks. It isn't a radiation that makes food radioactive, and the most common practical risk isn't the microwaves themselves but the heat, meaning burns from food or liquids that come out hotter than expected.
- History of Microsoft Windows: From MS-DOS to Windows 11 Windows launched in 1985 as a graphical shell that ran on top of MS-DOS, not as a standalone operating system. Starting in 1988, Microsoft was secretly developing something far more ambitious in parallel, led by engineer Dave Cutler: the NT kernel, built for the professional market. The two product lines ran side by side for years, the consumer one (Windows 95, 98, Me) and the NT one (Windows NT, 2000), until they merged into a single product with Windows XP in 2001. From there, every version through Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11 has been built on the same technical foundation, even though the name NT disappeared from marketing back in 2000.
- Windows vs macOS vs Linux: Differences, Pros and Cons Compared Windows, macOS and Linux are not just three different interfaces: they change how a computer is paid for, updated and customized. Windows runs on hardware from any manufacturer and requires a paid license; macOS is tied exclusively to Apple's own Mac computers; Linux is free, open source and powers most of the world's web servers while remaining a niche player on personal desktops. None of the three is objectively the best: the right choice depends on the use case, whether that's office work, software development, gaming or running a server.
- The EU AI Act: how Europe's artificial intelligence law works The AI Act is Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the law with which the European Union governs artificial intelligence: approved by the European Parliament and the Council on 13 June 2024, it entered into force on 1 August 2024. It sorts AI systems into four risk tiers — unacceptable, high, limited, minimal — and bans the most dangerous practices, such as government social scoring. The most serious violations can cost up to 35 million euros or 7% of a company's worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. The rules phase in on a staggered schedule spread over several years, already amended once in 2026 to push back some deadlines for high-risk systems.
- Flight data recorder: how the aircraft 'black box' really works The aircraft 'black box' isn't black, and it isn't a single device: it's really two orange recorders, the FDR (flight data) and the CVR (cockpit voice), often combined into one unit on modern aircraft. The idea came from Australian chemist David Warren in 1956, and it only became law after a 1960 crash whose cause was never determined. Both recorders are built to survive violent impacts, fire, and the crushing pressure of the deep ocean, so investigators can piece together what happened even when little else of the aircraft survives.
- Solar panel systems: panel types, incentives, and the best tilt angle A photovoltaic system turns sunlight into electricity through the photovoltaic effect, a physical process that happens inside cells made of semiconductor material, usually silicon. There are several families of cells (crystalline, thin-film, emerging technologies) and several types of installation, from a rooftop at home to agrivoltaic and floating systems. In Italy, as of 2026, anyone who installs a system can claim a personal income tax deduction and sell the electricity fed into the grid through the GSE's Ritiro Dedicato (Dedicated Withdrawal) scheme. Output depends largely on two practical choices: orientation, ideally facing south, and tilt angle, which can be calculated for any address with the European Commission's free PVGIS tool.
- What is PHP? The programming language running the web PHP is a programming language built for the web: the code runs on the server, not in the browser, and produces the HTML page a visitor sees. It was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, who wanted to track visits to his own online résumé, and in 2026 it is the most widely used server-side technology in the world. It has gone through several major versions — with the curious exception of the sixth, which never shipped — up to the PHP 8, the major version in use in 2026 — far more modern than its reputation as an old language suggests. From WordPress to Facebook, and frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, PHP remains everywhere beneath the surface of the web.
- Robot vacuum cleaners: how they work and navigate your home A robot vacuum is a small autonomous appliance that cleans your floors without being pushed by hand, finding its way around with sensors and returning to its dock on its own to recharge. The first commercially successful model, iRobot's Roomba, arrived in 2002, but it wasn't the first ever: the Electrolux Trilobite beat it to market back in 2001, after Electrolux had shown off a prototype on TV in 1996. Since then, navigation technology has changed radically, from the random movements of early models to real maps of the home built with lasers (LiDAR) or cameras (vSLAM). The industry is no longer dominated by one brand either: China has become the world's largest market, while iRobot itself went through a deep crisis that ended in bankruptcy in late 2025.
- The algorithm: what it really is (and why it's not a dirty word) An algorithm is a finite, precise sequence of steps to achieve a result: the definition covers a cooking recipe as much as Google's code. The word comes from the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who lived more than a thousand years ago. Today "the algorithm" has become the popular name for the systems that rank content on social media — which are algorithms, of a particular kind.
- Machine learning: what it is and how a machine learns Machine learning is the branch of artificial intelligence in which a piece of software, called a model, learns from data instead of following hand-written rules. Show it thousands of examples and it finds the patterns linking question and answer on its own: that's how it spots spam, recommends films, estimates prices. It's the technology behind almost all the AI you use daily.
- Neural networks: how they really work A neural network is a system of thousands of simple computing units connected in layers by millions (or billions) of weighted connections, loosely inspired by the brain's neurons. Every connection has an adjustable weight: during training the network tweaks the weights until the examples produce the right answers. With many layers it becomes deep learning, the technology behind image recognition, speech and large language models.
- Generative AI: what it is and how it works Generative AI is a technology that can create new content — text, images, audio, video, code — from a request written in natural language. It doesn't "copy" from an archive: it learned the patterns and rules of language by analyzing enormous amounts of data, and uses them to generate original answers, one word at a time.