If you’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a slippery concept. Perhaps one day there’s an accident or road closure ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

In life, we sometimes have to make decisions without all the information we want; that’s true in computer science, too. This is the realm of online algorithms — which, despite their name, don’t ...

Building on a landmark algorithm, researchers propose a way to make a smaller and more noise-tolerant quantum factoring circuit for cryptography. The most recent email you sent was likely encrypted ...

Future quantum computers will need to be less powerful than we thought to threaten the security of encrypted messages.

Pseudocode can be used to plan out programs. Planning a program that asks people what the best subject they take is, would look like this in pseudocode: REPEAT OUTPUT 'What is the best subject you ...

The key to any problem-solving task is to guide your thought process. The most useful thing to do is keep asking ‘What if we did it this way?’ Exploring different ways of solving a problem can help to ...