Communications of the ACM
An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
From ACM Opinion
Have Aliens Found s? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua
On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as "a red...
From ACM News
How the Artificial-Intelligence Program AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
A few weeks ago, a group of researchers from Google's artificial-intelligence subsidiary, DeepMind, published a paper in the journal Science that described an A...
From ACM News
In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?
In 2011, Hany Farid, a photo-forensics expert, received an e-mail from a bereaved father.
From ACM News
What Termites Can Teach s
New termite colonies are founded on windless evenings, at dusk, after the rain. Most termites have neither eyes nor wings, but every mature colony has a caste of...
From ACM News
Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?
Thomas Metzinger had his first out-of-body experience when he was nineteen.
From ACM Careers
Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords
When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses.
From ACM News
O.k., Computer, Tell Me What This Smells Like
Our sense of smell is gloriously specific.
From ACM News
A Field Farmed Only By Drones
Across the United Kingdom, the last of the spring barley has been brought in from the fields, the culmination of an agricultural calendar whose rhythm has remained...
From ACM News
Our Weather-Prediction Models Keep Getting Better, and Hurricane Irma Is the Proof
By Wednesday of last week, even as Tropical Storm Harvey continued to rain devastation on the Gulf Coast, a new storm, Irma, was taking shape in the eastern Atlantic...
From ACM News
Seeing with Your Tongue
The climbers at Earth Treks gym, in Golden, Colorado, were warming up: stretching, strapping themselves into harnesses, and chalking their hands as they prepared...
From ACM News
Could Ms. Pac-Man Train the Next Generation of Military Drones?
Thirty-five years ago, while Martin Amis was writing "Money," one of the novels that defined the 1980s, he admitted to a distracting dalliance with another contemporary...
From ACM News
Silicon Valley's Quest to Live Forever
On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear's living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the...
From ACM News
A Computer to Rival the Brain
More than two hundred years ago, a French weaver named Joseph Jacquard invented a mechanism that greatly simplified textile production.
From ACM News
The Many-Moons Theory
Unbeknownst to most earthlings, the moon is experiencing a crisis.
From ACM News
Rewriting the Code of Life
Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island.
From ACM News
Will Driverless-Car Makers Learn to Share?
Last Monday, the Obama Administration released a hundred-and-twelve-page policy tome, "Federal Automated Vehicles Policy," which, despite its sleep-inducing title...
From ACM News
Catching Dust
The ancient Egyptians believed that the universe emerged from an ocean called Nun, boundless and inert.
From ACM News
Hacking, Cryptography, and the Countdown to Quantum Computing
Given the recent ubiquity of cyber-scandals—Colin Powell’s stolen e-mails, Simone Biles's leaked medical records, half a billion plundered Yahoo accounts—you might...
From ACM News