Mashable’s series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives — and our futures. “The Algorithm” is impenetrable. It’s mysterious, it’s all-knowing, it’s ...

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 ...

Algorithms have taken on an almost mythical significance in the modern world. They determine what you see on social media and when browsing online, help form people’s belief systems, and impact the ...

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 ...

For better accountability, we should shift the focus from the design of these systems to their impact. Describing a decision-making system as an “algorithm” is often a way to deflect accountability ...

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 ...

It’s the most successful video app in the world. Our columnist has obtained an internal company document that offers a new level of detail about how the algorithm works. By Ben Smith There are four ...

When Elon Musk first proposed taking over Twitter, one the first changes he claimed he'd make would be "open-sourcing" Twitter's algorithm. Last week, Twitter finally followed through on that promise, ...

New research from Mozilla shows that user controls have little effect on which videos YouTube’s influential AI recommends. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm drives 70% of what people watch on the ...