If you’ve ever hung around scientists, you’ve most likely at some point heard one of them say “the best explanation is the simplest one.” But is it? From the behavior of ants to the occurrence of ...

The principle of parsimony, often referred to as “Occam’s razor,” favors a unifying explanation over multiple ones, as long as both explain the data equally well. This heuristic, widely used in ...

A new study from Oxford University has uncovered why the deep neural networks (DNNs) that power modern artificial intelligence are so effective at learning from data. The new findings demonstrate that ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American In a previous post I summarized my remarks at ...