Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...
From ACM Opinion
Space Stasis
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Beware the Cyber War Boomerang?
Stuxnet, most sophisticated cyber weapon ever developed, could turn on vulnerable U.S. infrastructure.
From ACM Opinion
The Purpose of Science Fiction
How it teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology.
From ACM Opinion
25 Years of Digital Vandalism
In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest...
From Communications of the ACM
Forest For the Trees
With the amount of disk space available to the modern programmer, and the lack of parental supervision in most...
From ACM Opinion
Apple: Disrupt or Perish
While the secret for Apple's success seems patently obvious to most&meash;as obvious as the form and function of the iPhone 4—a more subtle reason is the company's...
From ACM Opinion
2011 Preview: Million-Dollar Mathematics Problem
A draft solution to the so-called "P versus NP" problem generated excitement in 2010; will 2011 bring a correct proof?
From Communications of the ACM
Reflections on the Toyota Debacle
A look in the rearview mirror reveals system and process blind spots.
From Communications of the ACM
Don't Bring Me a Good Idea
You want to know how to get my attention?" Jason Kalich asked the audience rhetorically. "First off, don't bring me a good...
From ACM Opinion
Stuxnet's Finnish-Chinese Connection
I recently wrote a white paper entitled “Dragons, Tigers, Pearls, and Yellowcake” in which I proposed four alternative scenarios for the Stuxnet worm other than...
From ACM Opinion
Âbiquity Symposium: 'what Is Computation?'
A new series on ACM's Ubiquity seeks to answer the question: 'What is computation?' In this opening article, Ubiquity's editor-in-chief Peter J. Denning and co-author...
From ACM Opinion
"this Paper Should Not Have Been Published"
Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.
From ACM Opinion
Long Live the Web: A Call For Continued Open Standards and Neutrality
The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending.
From Communications of the ACM
Literate Coding
While it is true that "programmers aren't English majors," there are many days that I wish they were, or that...
From ACM Opinion
Why China's New Supercomputer Isn't Actually the World's Fastest
Peak performance doesn't equal sustained performance, and the NVIDIA GPUs in the Tianhe 1A are especially bad at the latter.
From ACM Opinion
On the Threshold of the Avatar Era
In a garage in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1980s, some friends and I were the first humans to experience becoming avatars—that is, movable representations of ourselves...
From Communications of the ACM
Why Do Software Startups Patent (or Not)?
Assessing the controversial results of a recent empirical study of the role of intellectual property in software startups.
From ACM Opinion
Why Graphene Is the Stuff of the Future
Everything in our three-dimensional world has a width, length and height. That was what we thought, at least. But this picture overlooks a whole class of materials...
From Communications of the ACM