Back in 1986 Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, stood in front of room of students and welcomed them to their first coding class. As he scrawled “COMPUTER ...

Algorithms are everywhere. They rule our lives. They decide what we see on social media, which ads get targeted to us, which route we should take to get places. If it used to be The Man keeping us ...

For better accountability, we should shift the focus from the design of these systems to their impact. Describing a decision-making system as an “algorithm” is often a way to deflect accountability ...

LaV's creators claim it's the first practical algorithm that can replace current-day encryption as the industry inches closer to creating a large-scale quantum computer. When you purchase through ...

The history of the social sciences has included a succession of advances in the ability to make observations and carefully test hypotheses. The compilation of massive data sets, for example, and the ...

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 ...

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 for ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. On March 15, Instagram posted a note on its blog that sent the internet into a frenzy: “To improve your experience, your feed ...