A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a potentially more effective way of helping computers solve some of the toughest optimization problems they face. Their ...

A puzzle that has long flummoxed computers and the scientists who program them has suddenly become far more manageable. A new algorithm efficiently solves the graph isomorphism problem, computer ...

We often hear that quantum computers efficiently solve problems that are very difficult to solve with a classical computer. But even if the hardware is available to build a quantum computer, ...

In 1994, a mathematician figured out how to make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in principle, a machine based on the rules of ...

Excerpted from Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More by Matt Parker ...