🚨 41 years in the making — and Dijkstra is no longer unbeatable. A Tsinghua, Stanford, and MPI for Informatics team has achieved the first deterministic algorithm to break the O(m + n log n) bound for single-source shortest paths in directed graphs with real non-negative weights. 💡 New runtime: O(m log^(2/3) n) 📜 Old best: Dijkstra + Fibonacci heap = O(m + n log n) The key? A hybrid of Dijkstra’s “frontier” idea and Bellman-Ford’s relaxation, with a recursive frontier-partition trick that keeps the heap tiny — dodging the classic sorting barrier. Impact: ⚡ Faster GPS recalculations 🚦 Smoother traffic flow 📦 Cheaper deliveries 🌐 Quicker network routing 📚 Time to rewrite the algorithms chapter on SSSP First real speedup for directed SSSP since 1984 — and it’s deterministic.