Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those ...

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 ...

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 ...

Elon Musk said Jack Dorsey was right about social media algorithms. On Wednesday, Musk highlighted a video of Dorsey talking about the free speech debate. Dorsey envisioned “a marketplace of ...

When it comes to teaching math, a debate has persisted for decades: How, and to what degree, should algorithms be a focus of learning math? The step-by-step procedures are among the most debated ...