Mashable’s series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives — and our futures. “The Algorithm” is impenetrable. It’s mysterious, it’s all-knowing, it’s ...

For better accountability, we should shift the focus from the design of these systems to their impact. Describing a decision-making system as an “algorithm” is often a way to deflect accountability ...

Algorithms have taken on an almost mythical significance in the modern world. They determine what you see on social media and when browsing online, help form people’s belief systems, and impact the ...

Quantum computers—devices that process information using quantum mechanical effects—have long been expected to outperform classical systems on certain tasks. Over the past few decades, researchers ...

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 ...

A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa student-led team has developed a new algorithm to help scientists determine direction in complex two-dimensional (2D) data, with potential applications ranging from ...

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 ...