More-efficient computation
At a time when the Internet puts an untold amount of information at anyone’s fingertips, and automated scientific experiments churn out data faster than researchers can keep up with it, and communications networks can include billions of people, even the simplest computational tasks can become so enormous that they would overwhelm even a powerful supercomputer. But sometimes it’s enough to know just a little bit about the solution to a monstrous calculation: biologists mining genomic data, for instance, might be interested in just a handful of genes.At the Innovations in Computer Science conference at Tsinghua University earlier this year, MIT researchers, together with colleagues at Tel Aviv University, presented a new mathematical framework for finding such localized solutions to complex calculations. They applied their approach to some classic problems in computer science, which involve mathematical abstractions known as graphs. The most familiar example of a graph is probably a diagram...