Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to add, starting with ...

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 ...

Using machines to augment human activity is nothing new. Egyptian hieroglyphs show the use of horse-drawn carriages even before 300 B.C. Ancient Indian literature such as “Silapadikaram” has described ...

Machine learning is not new. We have witnessed it since the 1990s, when Amazon introduced a new “recommended for you” section for its users to display more personalized results. When we search for ...

A team of computer scientists has come up with a dramatically faster algorithm for one of the oldest problems in computer science: maximum flow. The problem asks how much material can flow through a ...

PARASITES are nature’s thieves, but we can harness this behaviour for our own gain. We use algorithms to work out complicated problems like the best truck route or crew schedule, because finding a ...

Computer scientists are abuzz over a fast new algorithm for solving one of the central problems in the field. (January 15, 2017, update: On January 4, Babai retracted his claim that the new algorithm ...

Is my car hallucinating? Is the algorithm that runs the police surveillance system in my city paranoid? Marvin the android in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had a pain in all the ...