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 ...

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Computer scientists often ...

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Northeastern University, Google ...

Quantum computers promise enormous computational power, but the nature of quantum states makes computation and data inherently "noisy." Rice University computer scientists have developed algorithms ...

From powering search engines to securing data and optimizing networks, algorithms underpin nearly every aspect of modern technology. Understanding how efficiently they can solve problems — and where ...

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 at FIU’s College of Engineering and Computing have developed an encryption algorithm to defend videos from attackers with access to the world's most powerful computers. The encryption ...

Quantum-inspired algorithms can simulate turbulent fluid flows on a classical computer much faster than existing tools, slashing computation times from several days on a large supercomputer to just ...

The tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans has a brain just about the width of a human hair. Yet this animal’s itty-bitty organ coordinates and computes complex movements as the worm forages for food. “When ...