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Breaking the sorting barrier for directed single-source shortest paths
A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.
It’s like a souped-up version of a problem you need to solve each time you move: learning the best route from your new home to work, the gym and the supermarket. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Thorup and other researchers devised algorithms that broke the sorting barrier, but they needed to make certainassumptions about weights. He roped in three graduate students to help work out the details, and a few months later they arrived at a partial solution — an algorithm that broke the sorting barrier for any weights, but only on so-called undirected graphs.
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