Description
Book SynopsisDonald Knuth's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of methods for translating and defining programming languages to the creation of the TeX and METAFONT systems for desktop publishing. His award-winning textbooks have become classics; his scientific papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. The present volume, which is the fourth in a series of his collected works, is devoted to an important subfield of Computer Science that Knuth founded in the 1960s and still considers his main life's work. This field, to which he gave the name Analysis of Algorithms, deals with quantitative studies of computer techniques, leading to methods for understanding and predicting the efficiency of computer programs. More than 30 of the papers that helped to shape this field are reprinted and updated in the present collection, together with historical material that has not previously been published.
Table of Contents1. An almost linear recurrence; 2. The problem of compatible representatives; 3. The analysis of algorithms; 4. Mathematical analysis of algorithms; 5. The average height of planted plane trees; 6. An experiment in optimal sorting; 7. Shellsort with three increments; 8. The dangers of computer science theory; 9. Optimum measurement points for program frequency counts; 10. Ordered Hash tables; 11. Recurrence relations based on minimization; 12. Estimating the efficiency of backtrack programs; 13. An analysis of alpha-beta pruning; 14. Linear probing and graphs; 15. Activity in an interleaved memory; 16. Notes on generalized Dedekind sums; 17. Analysis of the subtractive algorithm for greatest common divisors; 18. Complexity results for bandwidth minimization; 19. Analysis of a simple factorization algorithm; 20. The complexity of nonuniform random number generation; 21. A trivial algorithm whose analysis isn't; 22. Evaluation of Porter's constant; 23. The expectant linearity of a simple equivalence algorithm; 24. Deletions that preserve randomness; 25. The average time for carry propogation; 26. A terminological proposal; 27. An analysis of optimum caching; 28. Optimal prepaging and font caching; 29. The distribution of continued fraction approximations; 30. The toilet paper problem; 31. A recurrence related to trees; 32. Stable husbands; 33. Postscript about NP-hard problems; 34. Nested satisfiability; 35. Textbook examples of recursion; 36. An exact analysis of stable allocation; 37. Big omicron and big omega and big theta.
