Algorithms unlocked / Thomas H. Cormen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cormen, Thomas H.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Computer algorithms.

Physical Description:

1 PDF (xiii, 222 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2013.

Summary:

Have you ever wondered how your GPS can find the fastest way to your destination, selecting one route from seemingly countless possibilities in mere seconds? How your credit card account number is protected when you make a purchase over the Internet? The answer is algorithms. And how do these mathematical formulations translate themselves into your GPS, your laptop, or your smart phone? This book offers an engagingly written guide to the basics of computer algorithms. In Algorithms Unlocked, Thomas Cormen -- coauthor of the leading college textbook on the subject -- provides a general explanation, with limited mathematics, of how algorithms enable computers to solve problems. Readers will learn what computer algorithms are, how to describe them, and how to evaluate them. They will discover simple ways to search for information in a computer; methods for rearranging information in a computer into a prescribed order ("sorting"); how to solve basic problems that can be modeled in a computer with a mathematical structure called a "graph" (useful for modeling road networks, dependencies among tasks, and financial relationships); how to solve problems that ask questions about strings of characters such as DNA structures; the basic principles behind cryptography; fundamentals of data compression; and even that there are some problems that no one has figured out how to solve on a computer in a reasonable amount of time.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Preface

1 What Are Algorithms and Why Should You Care?

Correctness

Resource usage

Computer algorithms for non-computer people

Computer algorithms for computer people

Further reading

2 How to Describe and Evaluate Computer Algorithms

How to describe computer algorithms

How to characterize running times

Loop invariants

Recursion

3 Algorithms for Sorting and Searching

Binary search

Selection sort

Insertion sort

Merge sort

Quicksort

Recap

4 A Lower Bound for Sorting and How to Beat It

Rules for sorting

The lower bound on comparison sorting

Beating the lower bound with counting sort

Radix sort

5 Directed Acyclic Graphs

Directed acyclic graphs

Topological sorting

How to represent a directed graph

Running time of topological sorting

Critical path in a PERT chart

Shortest path in a directed acyclic graph

6 Shortest Paths

Dijkstra's algorithm

The Bellman-Ford algorithm

The Floyd-Warshall algorithm

7 Algorithms on Strings

Longest common subsequence

Transforming one string to another

String matching

8 Foundations of Cryptography

Simple substitution ciphers

Symmetric-key cryptography

Public-key cryptography

The RSA cryptosystem

Hybrid cryptosystems

Computing random numbers

9 Data Compression

Huffman codes

Fax machines

LZW compression

10 Hard? Problems

Brown trucks

The classes P and NP and NP-completeness

Decision problems and reductions

A Mother Problem

A sampler of NP-complete problems

General strategies

Perspective

Undecidable problems

Wrap-up

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Title from title screen.

Description based on PDF viewed 12/23/2015.

ISBN:

9780262313230

0262313235

9781299284272

1299284272

9780262313223

0262313227