What are some must-know algorithms?

10 points·_dt47··4 comments

I'm fairly advanced in Java, and i want to learn some algorithms. Any suggestions?

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Here are a few (in no particular order):

- Dynamic Programming

- Graph algorithms: Traversal (A*), shortest path (Dijkstra, Bidirectional, Floyd–Warshall), minimum spanning tree

- Recursive Search Techniques

- Search Trees (binary, n-ary, splay, AVL)

- Suffix trees

- Parsing using regex

- Sorting (with all the variations)

- Hashing

- Greedy Algos

- Divide and conquer

- Genetic algorithms

There are a few other algorithms that are must-know too. I guess that would depend on the domain we are in (computer vision, machine learning, NLP, etc).

Do the Advanced Algorithms course in MIT`s Open Courseware site here http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Also look into Hadoop, Mahout and machine learning in general.

The best algorithm I know is to use the appropriate built-in classes, and then do something clever only if performance is an issue.

In my opinion knowing the popular and "best practice" design patterns is more important than knowing a lot of algorithms. Although I suppose they overlap a bit.

Food for thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first_search

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth-first_search

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho%E2%80%93Corasick_string_ma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm