Top CS Papers

A list of influential computer science papers with summaries and links

Attention Is All You Need
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, 2017
Artificial Intelligence~32,000+ citations

Introduced the Transformer architecture that revolutionized natural language processing and forms the foundation of modern AI systems like GPT and BERT.

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AlphaGo: Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search
David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, et al., 2016
Artificial Intelligence~8,000+ citations

Described the AI system that defeated a world champion Go player, combining deep neural networks with tree search algorithms.

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Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008
Cryptography~18,700+ citations

The whitepaper that introduced Bitcoin and blockchain technology, proposing a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.

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MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, 2004
Distributed Systems~25,000+ citations

Introduced the MapReduce programming model for processing and generating large datasets, which influenced the development of big data processing frameworks like Hadoop.

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The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Sergey Brin, Lawrence Page, 1998
Information Retrieval~20,000+ citations

Described the PageRank algorithm and the initial architecture of Google, revolutionizing web search and information retrieval.

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A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems
Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman, 1978
Cryptography~10,000+ citations

Introduced the RSA algorithm, one of the first practical public-key cryptosystems that is widely used for secure data transmission.

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A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks
E. F. Codd, 1970
Databases~12,500+ citations

Introduced the relational model for database management, which forms the basis of SQL and modern relational database systems.

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A Mathematical Theory of Communication
Claude Shannon, 1948
Information Theory~91,500+ citations

This foundational paper established the field of information theory, introducing concepts like bits, entropy, and channel capacity that underpin all digital communications today.

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On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
Alan Turing, 1936
Theoretical Computer Science~15,000+ citations

Turing's groundbreaking paper that introduced the concept of a universal computing machine (now known as a Turing machine) and laid the theoretical foundation for modern computers.

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