Sudoku fan? After diving into the math behind the game, test your skills with our very own puzzles in SciAm Games! Computer science seemingly rides a curve of unstoppable progress. Mere decades took ...

When computer scientists hang out at cocktail parties, they're apt to chat, among other things, about the single most important unsolved problem in computer science: the question, Does P = NP?

Last week, HP Labs mathematician Vinay Deolalikar started circulating a startling paper that claims to have solved the preeminent open problem in computer science, known as P = NP. Er, more accurately ...

An Italian researcher with a penchant for retro games -- or perhaps just looking for an excuse to play games in the name of science! -- has used computational complexity theory to decide, once and for ...

In 1994, a mathematician figured out how to make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in principle, a machine based on the rules of ...