Computational science: Can get satisfaction

The sheer complexity of some computational problems means they will probably never be solved, despite the ever-increasing resources available. But we can sometimes predict under what conditions solutions exist.Hard factsThis one is not for the faint-hearted. A team from Microsoft Research and the statistics department at Berkeley has looked into the problem of ‘extreme hardness’ that means that many practical problems remain well beyond current or projected computational capacity. It is the phase transitions that hold the key.