data structures
DAWG stands for Directed Acrylic Word Graph and in addition to having a cool name they are pretty useful. DAWGs are used for quickly determining whether or not a particular word is in a set of words. In short: very fast set inclusion. An additional side effect is that DAWGs use less memory that a straight dictionary list. There is also a variant of the DAWG called a compact DAWG that further reduces the memory footprint of the structure. What are the uses of a DAWG? The first thing that comes to...
I was doing some research tonight on Trie data structures based on a random thought I had on scanning streams. While searching I found NIST's Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. All I have to say is AWESOME. It gave me a cool idea. I'm writing an app that is going to pick a data structure at random. I'm going to run it every couple of days and, read up on the algorithm/data structure and post it to this blog. Hopefully I will learn a lot in the process and so will anyone who stumbles across...