At the upcoming ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, MIT researchers are expected to report that the Wagner-Fischer algorithm cannot be improved upon because it’s as good and efficient as it gets.

Algorithms are increasingly used by both public bodies and private companies to analyze voluminous data and make informed decisions. Their effects are perhaps most visible in baseball, where they have ...

Quantum computers still can’t do much. Almost every time researchers have found something the high-tech machines should one day excel at, a classical algorithm comes along that can do it just as well ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...