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Scientists have established the best algorithm for map navigation.

MONews
3 Min Read

“This is a great algorithm,” he said. Eric DemainI’m a computer scientist at MIT. “It’s very fast, simple and easy to implement.”

To carry out this procedure, you need to decide on a system for organizing your notes, or in computer science terms, a data structure. It may sound like a minor technical detail, but the time spent retrieving notes each time an item needs to be edited or removed can have a significant impact on the overall runtime of the algorithm.

Dijkstra’s paper used simple data structures that leave room for improvement. In the decades since, researchers have developed better ones, nicknamed “heaps,” which make certain items easier to find than others. They take advantage of the fact that Dijkstra’s algorithm only needs to remove entries for the closest remaining vertices. “The heap is basically a data structure that allows you to do this very quickly,” he said. Vaclav LauzonHe is a researcher at the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT), Sofia, Bulgaria.

In 1984, two computer scientists Clever hip design This allowed Dijkstra’s algorithm to reach the theoretical limit, or “lower bound,” on the time required to solve a single-source shortest path problem. In a certain sense, this version of Dijkstra’s algorithm is best. This was the last word on the standard version of the question for nearly 40 years. It wasn’t until several researchers took a closer look at what “best” meant that things changed.

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Researchers typically compare algorithms by studying how they perform under worst-case scenarios. Imagine the world’s most chaotic street grid, then add some particularly complex traffic patterns. If you are trying to find the fastest path in these extreme situations, the 1984 version of Dijkstra’s algorithm will perform best.

But hopefully your city doesn’t have the worst road network in the world. So you might ask a question. Is there an algorithm that excels across all road networks? The first step in answering this question is to make the conservative assumption that each network has a worst-case traffic pattern. We then try to make the algorithm find the fastest path through all possible graph layouts, assuming the worst possible weights. Researchers call this condition “universal optimality.” If there was a universal optimal algorithm for the simple problem of moving from one point on a graph to another, it could help overcome rush hour traffic congestion in every city around the world.

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