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A comment on Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm?.

Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm? by saheb37 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:31PM (#18241350)
The first time I implemented the backtracking algorithm it felt really special. I was struggling to solve 8 queen problems for a couple of nights, banging my head around it. And then when it worked, I knew my love for programming was not going anywhere any time soon.

It was ugly, I had used 8 for loops, each running for 8 iterations, but, I still felt awesome when it worked. Before this, I had written only lab programs. Next, I applied the backtracking algorithm to solve Sudoku recursively, and that's how it all began. I entered the world of algorithms.

I know it's just one form of brute force algorithm, maybe doesn't even count as one, and is not that elegant, but, it will always remain my favorite.

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Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm? by DonaldPShimoda on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @02:20PM (#18241967)
> I know it's just one form of brute force algorithm, maybe doesn't even count as one, and is not that elegant, but, it will always remain my favorite.

Backtracking is really a depth-first search over the search tree, so it's definitely an algorithm and I would say it's "elegant" in some sense (like simplicity).

[ Parent | on HN ]