Computer science

By using “classical shadows,” ordinary computers can beat quantum computers at the tricky task of understanding quantum behaviors.

Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms.

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach.

Quantum computing is still really, really hard. But the rise of a powerful class of error-correcting codes suggests that the task might be slightly more feasible than many feared.

Researchers have discovered ways around a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and beauty in digital images.

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure our digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the path they took. A new result suggests that the trade-off may be inevitable.