Here's what algorithms do behind the scenes and why they're important. Okay, what's an algorithm? A computer algorithm is a set of instructions that tell computers how to handle and interpret data.

Quantum computers promise enormous computational power, but the nature of quantum states makes computation and data ...

Computer scientists have written a network flow algorithm that computes almost as fast as is mathematically possible. This algorithm computes the maximum traffic flow with minimum transport costs ...

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.

Dijkstra’s algorithm was long thought to be the most efficient way to find a graph’s best routes. Researchers have now proved that it’s “universally optimal.” ...

Climate models can be a million lines of code long and can take months to run on supercomputers. A new algorithm has dramatically shortened that time.