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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

More and more machine learning is applied to human behavior. Increasingly these algorithms suffer from a hidden—but serious—problem. It arises because they often predict one thing while hoping for ...

Every sanctions team I speak to quotes a false-positive rate above 95 per cent as if it were weather. That number is not a ...

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 ...

Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to add, starting with ...

Elon Musk said Jack Dorsey was right about social media algorithms. On Wednesday, Musk highlighted a video of Dorsey talking about the free speech debate. Dorsey envisioned “a marketplace of ...