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 ...

Quantum computers are coming. And when they arrive, they are going to upend the way we protect sensitive data. Unlike classical computers, quantum computers harness quantum mechanical effects — like ...

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 ...

Computer scientists at ETH Zurich have written a network flow algorithm that computes almost as fast as is mathematically possible. This algorithm computes the maximum traffic flow with minimum ...

From powering search engines to securing data and optimizing networks, algorithms underpin nearly every aspect of modern technology. Understanding how efficiently they can solve problems — and where ...

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 ...

Sachdeva’s breakthrough challenges one of the most studied problems in computer science, known as maximum flow, which ...

Although quantum computing is a nascent field, there are plenty of key moments that defined it over the last few decades as scientists strive to create machines that can solve impossible problems.