Dear HN: What interesting algorithms would you like to read about?

12 points·nicksdjohnson··8 comments

I'm the author of the Damn Cool Algorithms series of posts (http://blog.notdot.net/tag/damn-cool-algorithms), a couple of which have been featured here on HN, and I'm looking at resuming the series on a more regular basis.

What algorithms do you think are 'damn cool' and not already sufficiently well written about in an accessible manner?

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Would you mind me asking you a question? It is pretty obvious that you are good at algorithms. Would you mind sharing how you got good at them?

I ask because although I am decent at programming as well as putting together the general structure of a program I seem to be weak at algorithms and have not had much success while trying to improve. Any advice: books / methodology is welcome.

Thanks

Dynamic Time Warping is a pretty neat application of dynamic programming that takes two time series and tries to squish one time series to look like the other, with some constraints that you can't do too much squishing. This is used a lot in speech recognition to normalize away variation like e.g. how long you spend on a vowel sound.

Bayesian networks.

Linear programming - not because it is cool but because it is so useful.

A step by step implementation of a bloom filter would be awesome.

Granted, they are data structures and not algorithms, but skip lists are really cool.

If you could really easily explain FFT algorithms, that'd be sweet!

Mutating Algorithms?

homomorphic signatures?

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