A backtracking Solution to the Pattern132 Problem

Pattern132 is an interesting problem I've seen floating around on various message boards. It is a constraint satisfaction problem that I've seen all manner of solutions for ranging from dynamic programming, to straight brute force iteration. When I fir

Prim's Minimum Spanning Tree Algorithm

Having covered Kruskal's MST algorithm in my last article, it seems only natural to now cover Prim's MST algorithm. Prim's algorithm is another Greedy Best First Search graph algorithm for finding the minimum spanning tree of a

Functional Enlightenment and the Java Streams API

Functional Programming with Java

Early in my career, I had a lead developer on a project who during code review, much to my chagrin, kept making me re-write what was in my opinion “perfectly good, working code”. To my lead however

Enforcing uniqueness of objects in std::set<> and std::unordered_set<>

Unique Collections

 Knowing that a collection is comprised of unique only items if a very useful thing indeed. It's so useful that this concept is the basis of one of the fundamental data structure: the Set. While this is not the on

The Heapsort algorithm

Ahh, Heaps. 

Heaps are one of those data structures that turn up everywhere. They serve a humble purpose: find the maximum value (depending on if you're using min or max ordering) of a set efficiently. It is this very purpose that imbues

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