One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

Complexity theory is a fundamental branch of theoretical computer science that categorises computational problems according to their inherent difficulty and the resources required to solve them. At ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

OpenAI’s latest generative AI model is much better at code generation than previous models, but slower and more expensive — and not quite ready for production. “Ho, hum,” I thought in response to the ...

Algorithms have taken on an almost mythical significance in the modern world. They determine what you see on social media and when browsing online, help form people’s belief systems, and impact the ...

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem. Many aspects of modern applied research ...

Ahmed Elgammal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...