Algorithms

Even with no one in charge, army ants work collectively to build bridges out of their bodies. New research reveals the simple rules that lead to such complex group behavior.

New algorithms show how swarms of very simple robots can be made to work together as a group.

The quest for "quantum supremacy" – unambiguous proof that a quantum computer does something faster than an ordinary computer – has paradoxically led to a boom in quasi-quantum classical algorithms.

To efficiently analyze a firehose of data, scientists first have to break big numbers into bits.

The real-world version of the famous “traveling salesman problem” finally gets a good-enough solution.

Just five days after posting a retraction, László Babai announced that he had fixed the error in his landmark graph isomorphism algorithm.

The legendary graph isomorphism problem may be harder than a 2015 result seemed to suggest.

The computer scientist Cynthia Dwork takes abstract concepts like privacy and fairness and adapts them into machine code for the algorithmic age.

When divvying something up, there's more than one way to define what's fair.