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 ...

Online algorithms are designed to make decisions sequentially, without complete knowledge of future inputs. In many real-world applications—from scheduling and resource allocation to network ...

Twitter has been trialing an unprecedented method to find the hidden biases in its own algorithms. The social media platform has enrolled external researchers in a one-of-a-kind competition, in which ...