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Computer Science

Algorithms, complexity and the limits of computation — how machines solve problems, and what they provably cannot.

19 articles

Computer Science

Compilers: From Source Code to Silicon

How a compiler translates human-readable source into machine code through lexing, parsing, and code generation — and why the compiled-vs-interpreted split is really about implementation.

10 min read·Aug 30, 2026
Computer Science

Data Compression: Saying More With Less

Why frequent symbols deserve shorter codes, how Huffman coding builds them, and the counting argument proving no lossless scheme can shrink every possible file.

10 min read·Aug 23, 2026
Computer Science

Caching: The Art of Keeping the Right Things Close

Why a small fast cache in front of slow memory speeds everything up, why locality makes it work, and why eviction policy decides the hit rate.

10 min read·Aug 10, 2026
Computer Science

Concurrency: When Threads Collide

Why interleaving threads corrupt shared state, how locks enforce mutual exclusion to fix races, and how those same locks can deadlock in a circular wait.

10 min read·Aug 9, 2026
Computer Science

Error-Correcting Codes: Fixing Bits Without Asking Again

How computers repair corrupted bits on their own using built-in redundancy — from parity to Hamming codes, syndromes, and the geometry of minimum distance.

10 min read·Jul 31, 2026
Computer Science

Floating-Point: Why 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3

Why 0.1 + 0.2 lands on 0.30000000000000004, how IEEE-754 packs a sign, exponent, and mantissa into 64 bits, and why float errors are deterministic, not glitches.

10 min read·Jul 22, 2026
Computer Science

How Neural Networks Learn

What a neuron actually computes, why the squashing function is the part that matters, and how backpropagation extracts every partial derivative in a single backward sweep.

10 min read·Jul 21, 2026
Computer Science

Public-Key Cryptography

One-way functions let two people who have never met build a shared key in the open — and the same asymmetry that protects the key is what a quantum computer would dismantle.

10 min read·Jul 18, 2026
Computer Science

Distributed Consensus

Why agreement across unreliable machines is genuinely hard, how quorum intersection and Raft's leader election solve it in practice, and what the FLP impossibility result and CAP actually say.

10 min read·Jul 14, 2026
Computer Science

Hash Tables

How hashing converts a key directly into a memory location, why collisions are unavoidable, and why the O(1) everyone quotes is an average that a bad day can destroy.

10 min read·Jul 13, 2026
Computer Science

P vs NP

Why verifying a solution and discovering one look like utterly different tasks, what NP-completeness says about that gap, and why fifty years of effort has not settled the most important open question in computing.

10 min read·Jul 12, 2026
Computer Science

The Halting Problem

Why no program can decide whether another program halts, how Turing's diagonal argument proves it, and what undecidability means for the tools that check your code.

10 min read·Jul 9, 2026
Computer Science

Recursion: Functions That Call Themselves

The base case, the call stack, and why naive recursive Fibonacci is exponential until one cache makes it linear.

10 min read·Jul 9, 2026
Computer Science

Finite Automata and Regular Expressions

How a regular expression compiles into a tiny memoryless machine, why that makes it fast, and why it provably cannot match balanced brackets.

10 min read·Jul 6, 2026
Computer Science

Logic Gates: How Computers Do Arithmetic

How on/off switches become logic gates, gates become adders, and adders turn binary digits into arithmetic — with no understanding anywhere in the machine.

10 min read·Jul 5, 2026
Computer Science

Dynamic Programming

Why naive recursive Fibonacci takes billions of calls, how remembering answers collapses it to n, and how the same trick solves edit distance and knapsack.

10 min read·Jun 15, 2026
Computer Science

Graph Traversal

How queues and stacks determine whether you explore a graph level by level or depth by depth.

8 min read·May 10, 2026
Computer Science

Binary Search

How halving the search space every step turns a million possibilities into twenty comparisons.

8 min read·Mar 15, 2026
Computer Science

Sorting Algorithms

From bubble sort to quicksort — see exactly how each algorithm works, step by step.

9 min read·Apr 22, 2025