The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

We publish the best academic work (that's too often lost to peer reviews & the TA's desk) to the global tech community ...

Terrestrial radio might seem like a relic of a bygone era, but it’s actually enjoying a bit of a resurgence with the younger generations. Driven by a combination of analog nostalgia and algorithm ...

In letters to consultants and the College Board, House and Senate Judiciary leaders invoked antitrust law and asked how student data feeds pricing algorithms. By Ron Lieber Ron Lieber welcomes ...

Joel Klatt has some passionate feelings about the College Football Playoff and what he believes is the best direction for the sport. He’s not afraid to share those feelings, and he dove into the ...

The SEC and Big Ten Conferences huddled up in New Orleans this week to essentially discuss two big topics: how to create a bigger monopoly on college football than they have already and collect more ...

There’s a familiar look in every college lecture hall. The glazed-over stare of someone just realizing they’re twelve slides wholly behind and lost. The professor keeps talking. The notes don’t make ...

A Reddit user was irked when a friend of his girlfriend asked if she could come over to their place "just to use our kitchen." "I barely know her, and it's not like it's an emergency," user ...

Abstract: The Steiner Forest Problem is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem in operations research and computer science. Given an undirected graph with non-negative weights for edges and ...