Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those ...

In algorithms, as in life, negativity can be a drag. Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a graph — a network of nodes connected by links, or edges. Often, these ...

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’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a ...

One of the most classic algorithmic problems deals with calculating the shortest path between two points. A more complicated variant of the problem is when the route traverses a changing network - ...

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 ...