General Science

Hardware, systems and algorithms research communities have historically had different incentive structures and fluctuating motivation to engage with each other explicitly. This historical treatment is odd given that hardware and software have frequently determined which research ideas succeed (and fail). This essay introduces the term hardware lottery to describe when a research idea wins...

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is widely seen as a possible usage of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We analyze the algorithm as a bang-bang protocol with fixed total time and a randomized greedy optimization scheme. We investigate the performance of bang-bang QAOA on MAX-2-SAT, finding the appearance of phase transitions with respect to the total time....

Large scientific projects in genomics and astronomy are influential not because they answer any single ques- tion but because they enable investigation of continuously arising new questions from the same data-rich sources. Advances in automated mapping of the brain’s synaptic connections (connectomics) suggest that the complicated circuits underlying brain function are ripe for analysis. We...

The neural circuits responsible for animal behavior remain largely unknown. We summarize new methods and present the circuitry of a large fraction of the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Improved methods include new procedures to prepare, image, align, segment, find synapses in, and proofread such large data sets. We define cell types, refine computational compartments, and...