Moore's Law
A pattern that held for fifty years: every two years, computers got twice as powerful for the same price. What happens when it stops?
19657 min read
Domain
Computer Science
Provable limits on what machines can decide, agree, or guarantee.
24 entriesFilter these further →
Beginner
Ages 8+, no background needed.
Murphy's Law
If anything can go wrong, will it? The saying is a joke — but the engineering principle behind it is dead serious.
19497 min read
Occam's Razor
When two explanations fit the evidence equally, which should you believe? The one that assumes less.
c. 13206 min read
The Birthday Problem
How many people must be in a room before two of them probably share a birthday? The answer is far smaller than you expect.
1939 (first published), circulating from the 1920s14 min read
Amara's Law
Every major technology is overhyped on arrival and underestimated a decade later. Why does intuition fail in the same direction twice?
19776 min read
Brandolini's Law
A tweet spreads a false claim to a million people. Correcting it requires essays and citations. Why does the truth always have to work harder?
20137 min read
Cunningham's Law
Ask a question online and wait hours. Post the wrong answer and be corrected in minutes. Why is the urge to correct stronger than the urge to help?
20106 min read
Hofstadter's Law
It always takes longer than you think — and that's still true even after you account for the fact that it always takes longer than you think.
19796 min read
Streisand Effect
The most reliable way to ensure millions of people see something is to try to prevent anyone from seeing it.
2003 (incident), 2005 (term coined)6 min read
Intermediate
Curious teenagers and general adult readers.
Brooks's Law
A software project is six months late. You add more developers. Now it's eight months late. Why?
19756 min read
Conway's Law
Your software will look like your org chart. Not because you planned it, but because you couldn't plan it otherwise.
19685 min read
Metcalfe's Law
Double the users of a network and the value quadruples. This simple mathematics is why some networks become monopolies and others die empty.
19806 min read
Moravec's Paradox
A computer beat the world chess champion in 1997. Getting one to pick up a cup it has not seen before is still hard.
198811 min read
The Two Generals' Problem
Two armies must attack at the same moment. Any message can be lost, including the one confirming the last one arrived.
1975 (proved), 1978 (named)18 min read
Advanced
Undergraduate level in the relevant field.
Maxwell's Demon
A tiny creature sorting fast molecules from slow ones appears to make heat flow the wrong way, for free, forever.
1867 (letter to Tait), 1871 (published in Theory of Heat)18 min read
The Halting Problem
No program can ever be written that reliably tells you whether another program will finish running. This is not a limit of our cleverness.
193620 min read
Braess's Paradox
Add a new road to a congested city and every journey gets slower. Close the road again and the traffic speeds up.
196819 min read
The Byzantine Generals Problem
Several generals must attack together or be destroyed. They can only send messengers, and some of the generals are traitors.
198222 min read
The CAP Theorem
A system spread across several machines can give you consistent answers, or always answer at all. The network makes you choose.
2000 (conjectured), 2002 (proved)23 min read
Berry's Paradox
"The smallest number that cannot be described in fewer than twelve words." That description is eleven words long.
1906 (published by Russell, crediting Berry); communicated c. 190419 min read
Levinthal's Paradox
A protein has more possible shapes than the universe has atoms, yet it finds the right one in less than a thousandth of a second.
1968–196917 min read
The Productivity Paradox
Computers arrived in every office through the 1970s and 80s. Measured productivity did not move for two decades.
1987 (Solow's remark), debate ongoing17 min read
Expert
Graduate level or specialist readers.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems
In any system of arithmetic strong enough to be useful, there are true statements it can never prove. Including this one.
193125 min read
The FLP Impossibility Result
A handful of computers cannot be guaranteed to agree on a single value if even one of them might be slow. Not merely hard — impossible.
198523 min read