Not long ago, a team of researchers from Stanford and McGill universities broke a 35-year record in computer science by an almost imperceptible margin — four hundredths of a trillionth of a trillionth ...

Bumblebees can find the solution to a complex mathematical problem which keeps computers busy for days. Scientists in the UK have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between ...

Is it hopeless to try to compute the shortest route to visit a large number of cities? Not just a good route but the guaranteed shortest. The task is the long-standing challenge known as the traveling ...

Tackling the traveling salesman problem with chemotaxis is a nice example of when the suboptimal is optimal, says Bartumeus. Of course, with all the information, time and resources in the world, ...

It’s Saturday; you’ve got errands to run. Your spouse wants bread from the bakery, you need to pick up the dry cleaning, your kids need new shoes, and you’ve got a dentist appointment. None of this is ...

A theoretical physicist named Eugene Wigner once referred to “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” -- a phrase that, on first hearing, sounds paradoxical. Math seems like rationality itself, ...

We have found the best path to take between the stars. The travelling salesman problem, an infamous mathematical puzzle that seeks the shortest route between many locations while visiting each only ...

Just when you think you've heard it all about the amazing intellectual skills of animals, we now know that bees are able to solve complex mathematical problems more rapidly than computers. Bees solve ...