Though most of us play Battleship by randomly targeting spots on the board with our little plastic nubs, data geek Nick Berry (president of DataGenetics in Seattle) has done an intensive analysis of the game and come up with what he thinks might be the best possible strategy to win.

When you're a robot, a new motion-planning algorithm can mean the difference between waving your arms around like an inflatable tube man and reaching for a coffee mug like you're supposed to.

We are quickly perfecting devices that can see behind walls. The latest incarnation of this superspy tech uses radio waves and simulated chaos to pinpoint objects that can't be seen.

Last year, the stock market suffered what's now called "the flash crash." The prices of shares in the US fell by 6 percent in 5 minutes. How could it happen? Algorithms. The algorithms that now control the stock market.

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17…

A group of network analysts wondered whether national boundaries really reflect people's connections to each other. So they looked at links formed between people phoning each other in Great Britain, and discovered which regions really have the most in common.

Quantum computers, which would rely on quantum mechanical concepts like superposition and entanglement to perform operations of unimaginable complexity, remain a pipe dream. But physicists have nevertheless come up with an algorithm that only quantum computers could use.