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.

Quantum computers promise significantly shorter computing times for complex problems. But there are still only a few quantum computers worldwide with a limited number of so-called qubits. However, ...

When Edsger W. Dijkstra published his algorithm in 1959, computer networks were barely a thing. The algorithm in question found the shortest path between any two nodes on a graph, with a variant ...

Consensus algorithms are processes where validators (also known as nodes or miners) within a blockchain network agree on the current state of the network. This mainly entails agreeing on whether a ...

It feels strange to think back to a time when we weren’t so concerned with social media algorithms. To the layperson, algorithms were just a nebulous mix of code that we knew controlled what we were ...