Algorithms, 4th Edition

Six. Context

COMPUTING DEVICES ARE UBIQUITOUS in the modern world. In the last several decades, we have evolved from a world where computing devices were virtually unknown to a world where billions of people use them regularly. Moreover, today’s cellphones are orders of magnitude more powerful than the supercomputers that were available only to the privileged few as little as 30 years ago. But many of the underlying algorithms that enable these devices to work effectively are the same ones that we have studied in this book. Why? Survival of the fittest. Scalable (linear and linearithmic) algorithms have played a central role in the process and validate the idea that efficient algorithms are important. Researchers of the 1960s and 1970s built ...