The Rubik's Cube has 43 quintillion arrangements
Yet any scramble can be solved in 20 moves or fewer -- a limit mathematicians nicknamed 'God's number.'
Today's briefing: a few timeless things worth knowing about words, language, AI, and puzzles. (Archive edition.)
Yet any scramble can be solved in 20 moves or fewer -- a limit mathematicians nicknamed 'God's number.'
An LLM is trained on enormous amounts of text so it can predict and generate human-like language -- the engine behind today's chatbots.
'Level,' 'racecar,' and 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama' all read identically forwards and backwards.
Master one root like 'port' (to carry) and you unlock import, export, portable, transport, and many more.
The earliest jigsaws, cut from maps in the 1760s, were made to teach geography to children.
The short word 'set' has hundreds of distinct senses, long cited as one of the most-defined words in English.