The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Computer scientists often deal with abstract problems that are hard to comprehend, but an exciting new algorithm matters to anyone who ...

Many embedded system applications involve storing and querying large datasets. Existing research in this area has focused on adapting and applying conventional database algorithms to embedded devices.

Anyone who has taken a basic computer science class has undoubtedly spent time devising a sorting algorithm—code that will take an unordered list of items and put them in ascending or descending order ...