The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve—akin to identifying a ...

Grade school math students are likely familiar with teachers admonishing them not to just guess the answer to a problem. But a new proof establishes that, in fact, the right kind of guessing is ...

Research teams from energy giant ExxonMobil and IBM have been working together to find quantum solutions to one of the most complex problems of our time: managing the tens of thousands of merchant ...

Computer scientists have written a network flow algorithm that computes almost as fast as is mathematically possible. This algorithm computes the maximum traffic flow with minimum transport costs for ...

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they’ll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can ...