What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it ...

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks. For ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

AlphaEvolve uses large language models to find new algorithms that outperform the best human-made solutions for data center management, chip design, and more. Google DeepMind has once again used large ...

Personalized algorithms may quietly sabotage how people learn, nudging them into narrow tunnels of information even when they start with zero prior knowledge. In the study, participants using ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Computer scientists often deal with abstract problems that are hard to comprehend, but an exciting new algorithm matters to anyone who ...

Estimating the number of triangles in a graph is a fundamental problem and has found applications in many fields. This problem has been widely studied in the context of graph stream ...

Microsoft has updated a key cryptographic library with two new encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. The updates were made last week to SymCrypt, a core ...

Artificial-intelligence programs, like the humans who develop and train them, are far from perfect. Whether it’s machine-learning software that analyzes medical images or a generative chatbot, such as ...