Computer scientists have come up with an algorithm that can fairly divide a cake among any number of people

Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

Two young computer scientists have figured out how to fairly divide cake among any number of people, setting to rest a problem mathematicians have struggled with for decades. Their work has startled many researchers who believed that such a fair-division protocol was probably impossible.

Cake-cutting is a metaphor for a wide range of real-world problems that involve dividing some continuous object, whether it’s cake or, say, a tract of land, among people who value its features differently — one person yearning for chocolate frosting, for example, while another has his eye on the buttercream flowers. People have known at least since biblical times that there’s a way to divide such an object between two people so that neither person envies the other: one person cuts the cake into two slices that she values equally, and the other person gets to choose her favorite slice. In the book of Genesis, Abraham (then known as Abram) and Lot used this “I cut, you choose” procedure to divide land, with Abraham deciding where to divide and Lot choosing between Jordan and Canaan.

Around 1960, mathematicians devised an algorithm that can produce a similarly “envy-free” cake division for three players. But until now, the best they had come up with for more than three players was a procedure created in 1995 by political scientist Steven Brams of New York University and mathematician Alan Taylor of Union College in Schenectady, New York, which is guaranteed to produce an envy-free division, but it is “unbounded,” meaning that it might need to run for a million steps, or a billion, or any large number, depending on the players’ cake preferences.

More here. (By the way, the very first Monday column written at 3QD was on “Cake Theory” more than 11 years ago, here.)