Quantum walks sound abstract, but they sit at the center of a very concrete race: who will harness quantum mechanics to solve problems that overwhelm today’s most powerful supercomputers. Instead of ...

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 ...

In algorithms, as in life, negativity can be a drag. Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a graph — a network of nodes connected by links, or edges. Often, these ...

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 ...

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 ...