Can you solve it? The magical maths that keeps your data safe

How to protect machines against random failures

I’ve temporarily moved to Berkeley, California, where I am the “science communicator in residence” at the Simons Institute, the world’s leading institute for collaborative research in theoretical computer science.

One nano-collaboration is today’s puzzle – told to me by a computer scientist at Microsoft I befriended over tea. It’s about data centres – those warehouses containing endless rows of computers that store all our data.