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 ...

A search problem refers to the task of finding a solution within some space of possible options, and that space could be made up of discrete steps or continuously varying values. For example, solving ...

Binary search is a cornerstone of computer science, offering a significant performance improvement over linear search. Among the numerous technical tools available for developers, binary search ...