Quantum walks sound abstract, but they sit at the center of a very concrete race: who will harness quantum mechanics to solve problems that overwhelm today’s most powerful supercomputers. Instead of ...

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 ...

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 ...