Imagine that your neighbor calls to ask a favor: Could you please feed their pet rabbit some carrot slices? Easy enough, you’d think. You can imagine their kitchen, even if you’ve never been there — carrots in a fridge, a …
For Shang-Hua Teng, theoretical computer science has never been purely theoretical. Now 58, Teng is a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and a two-time winner of the Gödel Prize, an annual award recognizing groundbreaking theoretical …
In algorithms, as in life, negativity can be a drag. Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a graph — a network of nodes connected by links, or edges. Often, these edges aren’t interchangeable: A …
In what specific cases do quantum computers surpass their classical counterparts? That’s a hard question to answer, in part because today’s quantum computers are finicky things, plagued with errors that can pile up and spoil their calculations. By one measure, …