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 ...

Raz, a professor at Princeton University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Tal, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, define a specific kind of computational problem. They prove, with ...

A major advance reveals deep connections between the classes of problems that computers can — and can’t — possibly do. At first glance, the big news coming out of this summer’s conference on the ...