Determining the least expensive path for a new subway line underneath a metropolis like New York City is a colossal planning challenge—involving thousands of potential routes through hundreds of city ...

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 ...

Researchers have successfully used a quantum algorithm to solve a complex century-old mathematical problem long considered impossible for even the most powerful conventional supercomputers. The ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve—akin to identifying a ...

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they’ll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Computer scientists often ...

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 ...

The three-body problem is a physics conundrum that has boggled scientists since Isaac Newton's day. But what is it, why is it so hard to solve and is the sci-fi series of the same name really possible ...

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 ...