Combinatorial problems abound in domains such as scheduling, routing, resource allocation and logical inference. Owing to their typically NP-hard nature, no single algorithm uniformly outperforms all ...

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 ...

Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first ...

A team of computer scientists has come up with a dramatically faster algorithm for one of the oldest problems in computer science: maximum flow. The problem asks how much material can flow through 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 ...

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 ...