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.

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 ...

Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research says that when quantum computing becomes generally available, evolutionary algorithms for training huge neural networks could become a very important and ...