Bin packing problems are a class of NP-hard combinatorial optimisation challenges with wide-ranging applications in logistics, manufacturing, cloud computing and scheduling. The fundamental task is to ...

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they’ll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can ...

Conventional quantum algorithms are not feasible for solving combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) with constraints in the operation time of quantum computers. To address this issue, researchers ...

What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it ...

In life, we sometimes have to make decisions without all the information we want; that’s true in computer science, too. This is the realm of online algorithms — which, despite their name, don’t ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Computer scientists often deal with abstract problems that are hard to comprehend, but an exciting new algorithm matters to anyone who ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...