“Imagine a computation that produces a new bit of information in every step, based on the bits that it has computed so far. Over t steps of time, it may generate up to t new bits of information in ...

If you’ve found that solving the most challenging levels of Super Mario Maker can be as taxing as your toughest college mathematics problem sets, you’re not alone, and now there’s scientific research ...

Having been invented in the US in the mid-20th century, Scrabble is now available in dozens of languages and sells in numbers measured in hundreds of millions. That makes it one of the most popular ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

What’s easy for a computer to do, and what’s almost impossible? Those questions form the core of computational complexity. We present a map of the landscape. How fundamentally difficult is a problem?