'Absurdly fast' algorithm solves 70-year-old logjam — speeding up network traffic in areas from airline scheduling to the internet

A long exposure photograph of traffic on a road at night in Toulouse, France.

Network slowdowns could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a superfast new algorithm.

The breakthrough offers a dramatically faster solution to a problem that has been plaguing computer scientists since the 1950s: maximum flow, or how to achieve the fastest flow of information through a system with limited capacity.