The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

Children as young as 4 years old are capable of finding efficient solutions to complex problems, such as independently inventing sorting algorithms developed by computer scientists. The scientists ...

Despite what watching the news might suggest, most people are averse to dishonest behavior. Yet studies have shown that when people delegate a task to others, the diffusion of responsibility can make ...

Trying to distinguish between the emails directly sent to me and which ones I was just being Cc’d into in my Outlook Inbox used to take me a heap of time. I’d need to wade through each one and read ...

Differential privacy (DP) stands as the gold standard for protecting user information in large-scale machine learning and data analytics. A critical task within DP is partition selection—the process ...

Every time a new slang word gets coined on the Internet, linguist Adam Aleksic is thrilled. “It’s definitely good for me in that I stay in business,” says Aleksic, who studies the origins of words and ...

There is a new sorting algorithm a deterministic O(m log2/3 n)-time algorithm for single-source shortest paths (SSSP) on directed graphs with real non-negative edge weights in the comparison-addition ...

Abstract: Polyethylene terephthalate bottle (PET) sorting equipment applies AI recognition technology to detect PET bottles on a conveyor belt, then transmits the category and location information to ...

Ever wondered how social media platforms decide how to fill our feeds? They use algorithms, of course, but how do these algorithms work? A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a ...

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 the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost.