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 ...

Children as young as 4 years old are capable of finding efficient solutions to complex problems, such as independently inventing sorting algorithms developed by computer scientists. The scientists ...

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 ...

Until JPMorgan dropped him as a client in 2013, America’s leading bank financially enabled the century’s most notorious sexual predator. By David Enrich My colleagues and I reviewed more than 13,000 ...

Using an advanced Monte Carlo method, Caltech researchers found a way to tame the infinite complexity of Feynman diagrams and solve the long-standing polaron problem, unlocking deeper understanding of ...

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 ...

Smartwatches are now over 25 years old, but just over a decade ago, Apple helped kickstart the current smartwatch industry with the launch of the original Apple Watch. From a focus on fitness to a ...

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks. For ...

Abstract: We describe a natural extension of the banker's algorithm (D.W. Dijkstra, 1968) for deadlock avoidance in operating systems. Representing the control flow of each process as a rooted tree of ...