Lecture

Union-Find and Minimum Spanning Trees

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In course

CS-250: Algorithms I

The students learn the theory and practice of basic concepts and techniques in algorithms. The course covers mathematical induction, techniques for analyzing algorithms, elementary data structures, major algorithmic paradigms such as dynamic programming, s ...

Description

This lecture covers the Union-Find data structure, where sets are represented as linked lists with operations like Make-Set and Union. It also delves into Minimum Spanning Trees, explaining the concept, algorithms like Kruskal's and Prim's, and their implementations.

Instructors (3)

Mikhail Kapralov

Teaching & PhD PhD Students Weronika Wrzos-Kaminska, Guy Weissenberg, Davide Mazzali, Ekaterina Kochetkova, Kshiteej Jitesh Sheth Past EPFL PhD Students Amir Zandieh, Aidasadat Mousavifar, Navid Nouri, Jakab Tardos, Grzegorz Adam Gluch, Makarov Mikhail Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Paritosh Garg Courses Algorithms II CS-450 The students learn the theory and practice of basic concepts and techniques in algorithms. The course covers mathematical induction, techniques for analyzing alg

Ola Nils Anders Svensson

Alessandro Chiesa

Alessandro Chiesa is a faculty member in computer science. He conducts research in complexity theory, cryptography, and security, with a focus on the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of cryptographic proofs that are short and easy to verify. He is a co-author of several zkSNARK libraries, and is a co-inventor of the Zerocash protocol. He has co-founded Zcash and StarkWare Industries. He is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), an Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2020), and Google Faculty Research Awards (2018 and 2017). He was included in MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators Under 35" list in 2018.

Official source

Related concepts (30)

Kruskal's algorithm

Kruskal's algorithm (also known as Kruskal's method) finds a minimum spanning forest of an undirected edge-weighted graph. If the graph is connected, it finds a minimum spanning tree. (A minimum spanning tree of a connected graph is a subset of the edges that forms a tree that includes every vertex, where the sum of the weights of all the edges in the tree is minimized. For a disconnected graph, a minimum spanning forest is composed of a minimum spanning tree for each connected component.

Prim's algorithm

In computer science, Prim's algorithm (also known as Jarník's algorithm) is a greedy algorithm that finds a minimum spanning tree for a weighted undirected graph. This means it finds a subset of the edges that forms a tree that includes every vertex, where the total weight of all the edges in the tree is minimized. The algorithm operates by building this tree one vertex at a time, from an arbitrary starting vertex, at each step adding the cheapest possible connection from the tree to another vertex.

Borůvka's algorithm

Borůvka's algorithm is a greedy algorithm for finding a minimum spanning tree in a graph, or a minimum spanning forest in the case of a graph that is not connected. It was first published in 1926 by Otakar Borůvka as a method of constructing an efficient electricity network for Moravia. The algorithm was rediscovered by Choquet in 1938; again by Florek, Łukasiewicz, Perkal, Steinhaus, and Zubrzycki in 1951; and again by Georges Sollin in 1965. This algorithm is frequently called Sollin's algorithm, especially in the parallel computing literature.

Greedy algorithm

A greedy algorithm is any algorithm that follows the problem-solving heuristic of making the locally optimal choice at each stage. In many problems, a greedy strategy does not produce an optimal solution, but a greedy heuristic can yield locally optimal solutions that approximate a globally optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time. For example, a greedy strategy for the travelling salesman problem (which is of high computational complexity) is the following heuristic: "At each step of the journey, visit the nearest unvisited city.

Linked list

In computer science, a linked list is a linear collection of data elements whose order is not given by their physical placement in memory. Instead, each element points to the next. It is a data structure consisting of a collection of nodes which together represent a sequence. In its most basic form, each node contains data, and a reference (in other words, a link) to the next node in the sequence. This structure allows for efficient insertion or removal of elements from any position in the sequence during iteration.

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Union-Find and Prim's Algorithm

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Algorithms: Union Find and Minimum Spanning Trees

Discusses Union-Find data structures and Minimum Spanning Trees, covering algorithms and their applications in network design and optimization.

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Prim's and Kruskal's Algorithms