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 ...

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 ...

In 1994, a mathematician figured out how to make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in principle, a machine based on the rules of ...

LLMs and classical optimization have been treated as separate tools. The teams pulling ahead use them together.

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 ...