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A team spread across Washington University in St Louis, the Indian Institute of Science, Heidelberg University, Johns Hopkins, and UC Santa Cruz built a computer to solve the kind of problem that stumps today's chatbots, and they describe it in a new paper out of the Indian Institute of Science . As they put it:

Today, AI models may have the capability to write novels and even steer a spacecraft. But give them a logistics network, a microchip to route, or a cryptographic lock, and they stall. These are combinatorial problems.

A combinatorial problem is one where the number of possible answers explodes as the inputs grow — think of every possible order to visit a list of cities, or every way a protein chain can fold up.…