A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a potentially more effective way of helping computers solve some of the toughest optimization problems they face. Their ...

The maximum-flow problem, or max flow, is one of the most basic problems in computer science. MIT researchers, together with colleagues at Yale and the University of Southern California, have ...

Two computer scientists found — in the unlikeliest of places — just the idea they needed to make a big leap in graph theory. This past October, as Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg were thumbing through a ...

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those ...

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 ...

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 ...