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What's the most elegant solution you've ever seen?

Sonal Kaur

11 months ago

274

Share solutions that made you go "wow, that's genius!" For me it was:

Boyer-Moore Voting Algorithm for finding the majority element. The idea that you can cancel out non-majority elements is so elegant.

Dutch National Flag for 3-way partitioning. Simple but the pointer movements are beautiful.

Floyd's Cycle Detection - using fast/slow pointers to detect cycles. The math behind why it works is fascinating.

What's your favorite?

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Comments (1)

Sagar Bansal11 months ago

For me, the Kadane's Algorithm for finding the maximum subarray sum is pure elegance. It's so efficient and turns a seemingly complex problem into a simple linear-time solution by just iterating once through the array. Do you ever wonder how someone even comes up with something like that?