Algorithms have taken on an almost mythical significance in the modern world. They determine what you see on social media and when browsing online, help form people’s belief systems, and impact the ...

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.

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 ...

Ever wondered how social media platforms decide how to fill our feeds? They use algorithms, of course, but how do these algorithms work? A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a ...

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 ...

A few years back, Google made waves when it claimed that some of its hardware had achieved quantum supremacy, performing operations that would be effectively impossible to simulate on a classical ...

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 ...

Method references are a shorthand way to write lambda expressions that call a single method. Rather than implementing a method in a functional interface, a method reference simply points to an ...