Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to ...

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 ...

Using machines to augment human activity is nothing new. Egyptian hieroglyphs show the use of horse-drawn carriages even before 300 B.C. Ancient Indian literature such as “Silapadikaram” has described ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Is my car hallucinating? Is the algorithm that runs the police surveillance system in my city paranoid? Marvin the android in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had a pain in all the ...