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 ...

A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a potentially more effective way of helping computers solve some of the toughest optimization problems they face. Their ...

Algorithms solve problems. But which algorithm is best suited to which problem? During his doctoral research, Diederick Vermetten developed methods to ...

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 ...

Machine learning is not new. We have witnessed it since the 1990s, when Amazon introduced a new “recommended for you” section for its users to display more personalized results. When we search for ...

Creating unbiased, accurate algorithms isn’t impossible — it’s just time consuming. “It actually is mathematically possible,” facial recognition startup Kairos CEO Brian Brackeen told me on a panel at ...

Computer scientists are abuzz over a fast new algorithm for solving one of the central problems in the field. (January 15, 2017, update: On January 4, Babai retracted his claim that the new algorithm ...

Quantum physicists have developed an algorithm that uses a single qubit to solve a problem that had previously needed thousands of them. Quantum computing offers the hope of dramatic increases in ...