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 ...

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem. Many aspects of modern applied research ...

From keeping our inboxes free from SPAM to mining your favorite cryptocurrencies, algorithms are all around us. While we feel like we’re drowning in an ocean of big data, clever algorithms are ...

A major advance reveals deep connections between the classes of problems that computers can — and can’t — possibly do. At first glance, the big news coming out of this summer’s conference on the ...

Triton Tech of Texas, LLC v. Nintendo of America, Inc. Addressing whether a patent specification provided adequate specificity to satisfy indefiniteness scrutiny of a means-plus-function claim, the ...