For something that has been around since the 1930s and is so foundational to computer science, you’d think that the Turing machine, an abstraction for mechanical computation, would be easily ...

IN 1935, Alan Turing set out to build a reputation by outflanking the world’s leading mathematician. Turing was 22 years old, and a new fellow at Cambridge. His target, David Hilbert, was the ...

Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been ...

In computational complexity theory, P and NP are two classes of problems. P is the class of decision problems that a deterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time. In useful terms, any ...