A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

Generating a string of random numbers is easy. The hard part is proving that they’re random. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams once pointed out, “that’s the problem with randomness: you can never be sure ...

The phenomenal success of our integrated circuits managed to obscure an awkward fact: they’re not always the best way to solve problems. The features of modern computers—binary operations, separated ...

An artificial intelligence created by the firm DeepMind has discovered a new way to multiply numbers, the first such advance in over 50 years. The find could boost some computation speeds by up to 20 ...

Here’s a deceptively simple exercise: Come up with a random phone number. Seven digits in a sequence, chosen so that every digit is equally likely, and so that your choice of one digit doesn’t affect ...

When I was 9, my family got a new computer. It was better than our old computer in every way save one: It couldn’t run my favorite racing game. What’s the point of a fancy new computer, I remember ...

Quantum computers promise to speed calculations dramatically in some key areas such as computational chemistry and high-speed networking. But they're so different from today's computers that ...

Google scientists have created a new algorithm that can solve problems on a quantum processor 13,000 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers. They say it brings us one step closer to ...