It's a simple word that has developed a sinister connotation: algorithm. For many of us, algorithms help determine what we watch, read and listen to — in the process, confirming our tastes and biases, ...

SYSTEMS APPROACH Last year a couple of people forwarded to me the same article on a new method of finding shortest paths in networks. Dijkstra is a legend in computer science and his algorithm, which ...

When Edsger W. Dijkstra published his algorithm in 1959, computer networks were barely a thing. The algorithm in question found the shortest path between any two nodes on a graph, with a variant ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...