“We had to control how big a number shows up as we do this guessing and coordination,” said Peng. Peng and Vempala prove that their algorithm can solve any sparse linear system in n 2.332 steps. This ...

It may be that life is just an example of Grover’s quantum search at work, and that this algorithm is itself a fundamental property of nature. That’s a Big Idea if ever there was one.

Specific algorithms have hyperparameters that control the shape of their search. For example, a Random Forest Classifier has hyperparameters for minimum samples per leaf, max depth, minimum ...