BERLIN – Computers may have us beat at chess and checkers, but new research suggests our brains still have an edge when it comes to solving certain tricky problems thanks to a very human trait: intuition. Scientists in Denmark have found that people who played a game that simulated a complex calculation in physics sometimes did better than their silicon rivals. "The big surprise we had was that some of the players actually had solutions that were of high quality and of shorter duration than any computer algorithms could find," said Jacob Friis Sherson, a physicist at Aarhus University who co-wrote the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Experts say the results could advance the quest to develop effective quantum computers, something most major universities and several tech companies are working on as they seek to accelerate processing power. Such computers use individual atoms to store information and it's hoped they could one day outperform even the fastest conventional silicon-based supercomputers.

Computers may have us beat at chess and checkers, but new research suggests our brains still have an edge when it comes to solving certain tricky problems thanks to a very human trait: intuition. Scientists in Denmark have found that people who played a game that simulated a complex calculation in physics sometimes did better than their silicon rivals. "The big surprise we had was that some of the players actually had solutions that were of high quality and of shorter duration than any computer algorithms could find," said Jacob Friis Sherson, a physicist at Aarhus University who co-wrote the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Experts say the results could advance the quest to develop effective quantum computers, something most major universities and several tech companies are working on as they seek to accelerate processing power. Such computers use individual atoms to store information and it's hoped they could one day outperform even the fastest conventional silicon-based supercomputers.