Determining the least expensive path for a new subway line underneath a metropolis like New York City is a colossal planning challenge—involving thousands of potential routes through hundreds of city ...

Kruskal’s algorithm finds a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) by building it edge by edge, always choosing the cheapest edge that doesn’t create a cycle. Sorting all edges in the graph from smallest weight ...

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 ...

Researchers have successfully used a quantum algorithm to solve a complex century-old mathematical problem long considered impossible for even the most powerful conventional supercomputers. The ...

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 ...

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks. For ...

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 ...

Abstract: This paper describes an implementation of Kruskal's algorithm in query optimization process for generation of a near optimal execution query tree. The open source Post- greSQL DBMS was used ...

If you want to accentuate the importance of a problem, it seems sensible to explain how prevalent it is. Lots of people are at risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Lots of women carry a gene that makes them ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Computer scientists often ...