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 ...

Complexity theory is a branch of computer science that studies the resources required to solve computational problems, particularly focusing on the classification of problems based on their inherent ...

Theoretical computer scientists are always probing the relationship of space (memory) and time. For 50 years, experts knew that a calculation of X steps required X/log X memory slots, but a new study ...