Combinatorial problems abound in domains such as scheduling, routing, resource allocation and logical inference. Owing to their typically NP-hard nature, no single algorithm uniformly outperforms all ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve—akin to identifying a ...

Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first ...