# Tag Info

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Algorithms that are the main driver behind a system are, in my opinion, easier to find in non-algorithms courses for the same reason theorems with immediate applications are easier to find in applied mathematics rather than pure mathematics courses. It is rare for a practical problem to have the exact structure of the abstract problem in a lecture. To be ...

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PageRank is one of the best-known such algorithms. Developed by Google co-founder Larry Page and co-authors, it formed the basis of Google's original search engine and is widely credited with helping them to achieve better search results than their competitors at the time. We imagine a "random surfer" starting at some webpage, and repeatedly clicking a ...

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I would mention the widely-used software CPLEX (or similar) implementation of the Simplex method/algorithm for solving linear programming problems. It is the (?) most used algorithm in economy and operations research. "If one would take statistics about which mathematical problem is using up most of the computer time in the world, then (not counting ...

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If I understand your question correctly, a canonical example would be deciding if a graph $G$ has an Eulerian circuit: equivalent to checking that $G$ is connected and every vertex has even degree.

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Here's a lower bound from sorting. Given an input set $S$ of length $n$ to be sorted, create an input to your running median problem consisting of $n-1$ copies of a number smaller than the minimum of $S$, then $S$ itself, then $n-1$ copies of a number larger than the maximum of $S$, and set $k=2n-1$. The running medians of this input are the same as the ...

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Yes. In fact, by the McCreight-Meyer Union Theorem (Theorem 5.5 of McCreight and Meyer, 1969, free version here) a result of that I believe is due to Manuel Blum, there is a single function $f$ such that $\mathsf{P} = \mathsf{DTIME}(f(n))$. This function is necessarily superpolynomial, but "just barely." The theorem applies more generally to any Blum ...

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Deciding isomorphism of simple groups, given by their multiplication tables. The fact that this can be done in polynomial time follows directly from the fact that all finite simple groups can be generated by at most 2 elements, and currently the only known proof of that fact uses the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (perhaps the largest theorem - in ...

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As I understand it, the National Resident Matching Program was for a long time just a straight application of the Gale-Shapley algorithm for the stable marriage problem. It has since been slightly updated to handle some extra details like spousal assignments (aka the "two-body problem"), etc...

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The AKS Primality testing algorithm may be a good candidate, where the best algorithm currently known version of the algorithm has $\tilde{O}(n^6)$ running time. See Primality testing with Gaussian periods (Lenstra and Pomerance).

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I am assuming that you are referring to CDCL SAT solvers on benchmark data sets like those used in the SAT Competition. These programs are based on many heuristics and lots of optimization. There were some very good introductions to how they work at Theoretical Foundations of Applied SAT Solving workshop at Banff in 2014 (videos). These algorithms are based ...

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Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in number theory. Short answer: If you're willing to assume "reasonable number-theoretic conjectures", then we can tell whether there is a prime in the interval $[n, n+\Delta]$ in time $\mathrm{polylog}(n)$. If you're not willing to make such an assumption, then there is a beautiful algorithm due to Odlyzko that achieves $n^{1/... 26 There are several examples of problems where a parameterized algorithm performs well in practice. Let me mention two such problems. In the$k$-Path problem where we are looking for a simple path of length$k$. Alon, Yuster and Zwick [1] showed that this problem can be solved in$2^{O(k)}\cdot n$time on$n$-vertex graphs. A weighted version of$k$-Path has ... 25 it is known that given a graph G and a tree T, it can be verified in linear time that T is a minimum spanning tree of G. But we don't yet have a deterministic linear time algorithm to compute the MST. Of course the gap is tiny (1 vs$\alpha(n)$), but it's still there :)) 24 I like this textbook very much: Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou, and Umesh Vazirani: Algorithms Published by McGraw-Hill 2007. I don't calculate your suggested ratio but I think you will also like it :) 24 Simple answer: If there does exist a more efficient algorithm that runs in$O(n^{\delta})$time for some$\delta < 2$, then the strong exponential time hypothesis would be refuted. We will prove a stronger theorem and then the simple answer will follow. Theorem: If we can solve the intersection non-emptiness problem for two DFA's in$O(n^{\delta})$time,... 23 If you're also including PhD-level stuff, many (most?) graduate CS programs include some course in coding theory. If you have a course in coding theory, you will definitely cover the Reed-Solomon code which is integral to how compact discs work and Huffman encoding which is used in JPEG, MP3, and ZIP file formats. Depending on the orientation of the course, ... 23 3-SAT may be one such problem. Currently the best upper bound for Unique 3-SAT is exponentially faster than for general 3-SAT. (The speedup is exponential, although the reduction in the exponent is tiny.) The record-holder for the unique case is this paper by Timon Hertli. Hertli's algorithm builds upon the important PPSZ algorithm of Paturi, Pudlák, ... 23$\mathsf{NL} \neq \mathsf{coNL}$. Prior to the result that these two were equal, I think it was widely believed that they were distinct, by analogy with the belief that$\mathsf{NP} \neq \mathsf{coNP}$(i.e. the general principle that "nondeterministism and co-nondeterminism are different"; this turned out to be false under space complexity bounds that were ... 22 GNU grep is a command line tool for searching one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. It is well-known that grep is very fast! Here's a quote from its author Mike Haertel (taken from here): GNU grep uses the well-known Boyer-Moore algorithm, which looks first for the final letter of the target string, and uses a lookup ... 22 This is a special case of the Travelling Salesman with Neighborhoods (TSPN) problem. In the general version, the neighborhoods need not all be the same. A paper by Dumitrescu and Mitchell, Approximation algorithms for TSP with neighborhoods in the plane, addresses your question. They give a constant factor approximation algorithm for a slightly more general ... 22 I am typing this quite quickly due to severe time constraints (and didn't even get to responding earlier for the same reason), but I thought I would try to at least chip in with my two cents. I think this is a truly great question, and have spent a nontrivial amount of time over the last few years looking into this. (Full disclosure: I have received a big ... 21 A friend of mine works on the combinatorics of Sturmian words, and did so for years. A Sturmian word is typically obtained from a straight line drawn on a lattice: whenever the line crosses an horizontal edge of the lattice, output an 1; whenever it crosses a vertical edge, output a 0. From my point of view, this is quite theoretical. Yet, my friend was ... 20 This afternoon I was reading Stringology -- the "Real" string theory. Problem: If$x$and$y$are two strings over some alphabet when are there some positive integers$m, n$such that$x^m = y^n$. Theorem: There are positive integers$m,n$such that$x^m = y^n$if and only if$xy = yx$. 20 Here the goal is to construct a decision problem D so that (a) if you can factor you can solve the decision problem in polynomial time and (b) if you can solve the decision problem you can factor in polynomial time. There are a number of ways to do this. To name just two: D: given n and k, does n have a divisor d satisfying 1 < d <= k? D: given n ... 20 Prior to$\mathsf{IP} = \mathsf{PSPACE}$, it was thought possible that even$\mathsf{coNP}$wasn't contained in$\mathsf{IP}$: in Fortnow-Sipser 1988 they conjectured this to be the case and gave an oracle relative to which it was true. 20 This paper shows that there are verification algorithms for both YES and NO instances for 3 problems, including Max flow, 3SUM, and APSP, which are faster by a polynomial factor than the known bounds for computing the solution itself. There is a class of problems, namely the ones which improving the running time is SETH-hard, whose the running time for ... 20 2D local maximum input: 2-dimensional$n \times n$array$A$output: a local maximum -- a pair$(i,j)$such that$A[i,j]$has no neighboring cell in the array that contains a strictly larger value. (The neighboring cells are those among$A[i, j+1], A[i, j-1], A[i-1, j], A[i+1, j]$that are present in the array.) So, for example, if$A$is$$\begin{... 19 As far as I know, the state of the art is what is reported in Hans L. Bodlaender, Fedor V. Fomin, Arie M. C. A. Koster, Dieter Kratsch, and Dimitrios M. Thilikos (2012), "On exact algorithms for treewidth", ACM Transactions on Algorithms 9 (1): A12, doi:10.1145/2390176.2390188. The methods described there include an implemented$O^*(2^n)\$ algorithm with ...

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More generally, the Kanellakis prize is awarded by the ACM for precisely such theoretical discoveries that have had a major impact in practice. the 2012 award is for locality-sensitive hashing, which has become a go-to method for dimensionality reduction in data mining for near neighbor problems (and is relatively easy to teach - at least the algorithm ...

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