The world of computing is full of buzzwords: AI, supercomputers, machine learning, the cloud, quantum computing and more. One word in particular is used throughout computing – algorithm. In the most ...

A formula used to turn ordinary data, or "plaintext," into a secret coded message known as "ciphertext." The ciphertext can reside in storage or travel over unsecure networks without its contents ...

Computer programmers have developed a new 'cutting-plane' algorithm, a general-purpose algorithm for solving optimization problems. The algorithm improves on the running time of its most efficient ...

People have performed many mathematical proofs to show that a quantum computer will vastly outperform traditional computers on a number of algorithms. But the quantum ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

A formula used to reorder data into a new sequence. Like all complicated problems, there are many solutions that can achieve the same results, and one sort algorithm can re-sequence data faster than ...

Future quantum computers will need to be less powerful than we thought to threaten the security of encrypted messages.