The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...

The first computer didn’t show up looking like anything we’d call a computer now. There was no screen, no keyboard, no mouse, and definitely no controller waiting beside it. Early computers were built ...

A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just ...