Graph problems look similar to tree problems, but there are a few differences. Trees have a series of nodes. Each node may have zero, one, or multiple child nodes, but it can only be referenced from parent to child, or child to parent. In a graph, each node is called a vertex. Each Vertex can…
A depth first search algorithm analyzes the first child node for a match, and if one is not found, then it moves to that nodes children. This repeats until either a depth limit is reached, or there are no more children. Because of the complexity of some trees, consider a list of all websites to…
The first, and one of the most common methods to search is using a breadth first search (BFS) pattern. In this case, you start at the root node of the tree, and evaluate the first child determining if you have a match. If not, you move to its sibling and then the next, until there…
Data transformation is often simple like splitting a full name into the first and last, or vice versa. However, sometimes it is more complicated, much more complicated. I once wrote a data converter which had to convert data stored in a file with the size of data store being a certain number of bytes into…
While similar in name to the Merge Sort, the Merge Sorted is a bit of a special case type of sort, and shares none of the same methodology. In it, you take two, or more sources, which are already sorted, and you merge them together. As you merge them together, you determine from which list,…
While the Quicksort is relatively fast, O(nlog(n)) in terms of speed on average, a lot of programmers fear it because they don’t like, understand, or maybe even know about recursion. Recursion is the process of a function calling itself. There is usually a slight penalty for recursion as each function call is slower than if…
The bubble sort is one of the simplest sorts you can write, from a developer’s perspective. Unfortunately, it is one of the slowest to run from the computer’s perspective. A Bubble Sort works on the following idea. Given a list of values, start at the top value, and look at the next value. If the…
Now the idea behind weighted search is nice, but it is complicated, requires several extra calculation steps, and can cause other issues. In a Database, you might have heard about indexing. The idea of finding a way to store a subset of your table which means faster searching. Of course, if you are looking through…
