If you’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a slippery concept. Perhaps one day there’s an accident or road closure ...

Computer scientists have written a network flow algorithm that computes almost as fast as is mathematically possible. This algorithm computes the maximum traffic flow with minimum transport costs 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. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

In life, we sometimes have to make decisions without all the information we want; that’s true in computer science, too. This is the realm of online algorithms — which, despite their name, don’t ...

Mashable’s series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives — and our futures. “The Algorithm” is impenetrable. It’s mysterious, it’s all-knowing, it’s ...

Building on a landmark algorithm, researchers propose a way to make a smaller and more noise-tolerant quantum factoring circuit for cryptography. The most recent email you sent was likely encrypted ...