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 ...

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 ...

It’s excusable if you didn’t notice it when a scientist named Daniel J. Buehrer, a retired professor from the National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, published a white paper earlier this month ...

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 ...