Tag
#algorithms
9 articles
Public-Key Cryptography
One-way functions let two people who have never met build a shared key in the open — and the same asymmetry that protects the key is what a quantum computer would dismantle.
Hash Tables
How hashing converts a key directly into a memory location, why collisions are unavoidable, and why the O(1) everyone quotes is an average that a bad day can destroy.
P vs NP
Why verifying a solution and discovering one look like utterly different tasks, what NP-completeness says about that gap, and why fifty years of effort has not settled the most important open question in computing.
Recursion: Functions That Call Themselves
The base case, the call stack, and why naive recursive Fibonacci is exponential until one cache makes it linear.
Dynamic Programming
Why naive recursive Fibonacci takes billions of calls, how remembering answers collapses it to n, and how the same trick solves edit distance and knapsack.
Graph Traversal
How queues and stacks determine whether you explore a graph level by level or depth by depth.
Binary Search
How halving the search space every step turns a million possibilities into twenty comparisons.
Sieve of Eratosthenes
Start with every number, then cross out the non-primes. What's left is beautiful.
Sorting Algorithms
From bubble sort to quicksort — see exactly how each algorithm works, step by step.