We already know what’s topological sort of a directed acyclic graph. So why do we need a revision of this algorithm? First of all I never mentioned its complexity, thus to understand why we do need a revision let’s get again on the algorithm.
We have a directed acyclic graph (DAG). There are no cycles so we must go for some kind of order putting all the vertices of the graph in such an order, that if there’s a directed edge (u, v), u must precede v in that order.
The process of putting all the vertices of the DAG in such an order is called topological sorting. It’s commonly used in task scheduling or while finding the shortest paths in a DAG.
The algorithm itself is pretty simple to understand and code. We must start from the vertex (vertices) that don’t have predecessors.
We saw how to find the shortest path in a graph with positive edges using the Dijkstra’s algorithm. We also know how to find the shortest paths from a given source node to all other nodes even when there are negative edges using the Bellman-Ford algorithm. Now we’ll see that there’s a faster algorithm running in linear time that can find the shortest paths from a given source node to all other reachable vertices in a directed acyclic graph, also known as a DAG.
Because the DAG is acyclic we don’t have to worry about negative cycles. As we already know it’s pointless to speak about shortest path in the presence of negative cycles because we can “loop” over these cycles and practically our path will become shorter and shorter.
The presence of a negative cycles make our atempt to find the shortest path pointless!
As we saw in the previous post, the algorithm of Dijkstra is very useful when it comes to find all the shortest paths in a weighted graph. However it has one major problem! Obviously it doesn’t work correctly when dealing with negative lengths of the edges.
We know that the algorithm works perfectly when it comes to positive edges, and that is absolutely normal because we try to optimize the inequality of the triangle.
Since all the edges are positive we get the closest one!
Since Dijkstra’s algorithm make use of a priority queue normally we get first the shortest adjacent edge to the starting point. In our very basic example we’ll get first the edge with the length of 3 -> (S, A).
We already know how we can find the shortest paths in a graph starting from a given vertex. Practically we modified breadth-first search in order to calculate the distances from s to all other nodes reachable from s. We know that this works because BFS walks through the graph level by level.
BFS is often used to find shortest paths between a starting node (s) and all other reachable nodes in a graph!
Some sources give a very simple explanation of how BFS finds the shortest paths in a graph. We must just think of the graph as a set of balls connected through strings.
We can think of a graph as a set of balls connected through strings!
As we can see by lifting the ball called “S” all other balls fall down. The closest balls are directly connected to “s” and this is the first level, while the outermost balls are those with longest paths.
Breadth-first search works much like the image above – it explores the graph level by level, thus we’re sure that all the paths are the shortest!
Clearly edges like those between A and B doesn’t matter for our BFS algorithm because they don’t make the path from S to C through B shorter. This is also known as the triangle inequality, where the sum of the lengths of two of the sides of the triangle is always greater than the length of the third side.
What the triangle inequality says us is that if we have a direct edge between two nodes – that must be the shortest path between them!
We must only answer the question is BFS the best algorithm that finds the shortest path between any two nodes of the graph? This is a reasonable question because as we know by using BFS we don’t find only the shortest path between given vertices i and j, but we also get the shortest paths between i and all other vertices of G. This is an information that we actually don’t need, but can we find the shortest path between i and j without that info? Continue reading Computer Algorithms: Dijkstra Shortest Path in a Graph→
Since we already know how to represent graphs, we can go further for some very simple approaches of walking through them. Passing by all the vertices of a graph is a fundamental technique for most of the graph algorithms, such as finding shortest/longest paths, etc.
First thing to note is that graphs are not trees, in most of the cases, so walking through them can’t start from a root, as we do with trees. What we must do first is to decide from where to start – in other words – choosing a starting vertex.
It’s clear that depending on the starting point we can get different passes through the graph. Thus choosing a starting point can be very important for our algorithm!
After that we need to know how to proceed. There are two approaches mostly known as “breadth first” and “depth first” search. While depth first search start from a vertex and goes as far as possible, then walks back and passes through vertices that haven’t been visited yet, breath first search is an approach of passing through all the neighbors of the node first, and then go to the next level. Continue reading Computer Algorithms: Graph Breadth First Search→
