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.

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 ...

“To me, an algorithm is any piece of automated code that accepts some number of variables and data, [then] uses those variables and data to make decisions. But that’s the boring computer science ...

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 ...