Computer Scientists Take Road Less Traveled

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 of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent, to be exact. The advance — made to that poster child for hard-to-solve computer science quandaries, the "traveling salesman" problem — was too minuscule to have any immediate practical significance, but it has breathed new life into the search for improved approximate solutions.

From Simons Foundation 
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