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Improving Saddleback Search: A Lesson in Algorithm Design

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Mathematics of Program Construction (MPC 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4014))

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Abstract

Over the past twenty-five years or so Saddleback search has been used as an paradigm of how methods of formal program construction can quickly lead to a simple and effective algorithm for searching an ordered table. In this paper we revisit the problem and show that saddleback search is not in fact the best algorithm when one dimension of the table is much smaller than the other. The paper is structured in the form of a classroom discussion involving a teacher and four very clever students.

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References

  1. Backhouse, R.: Program Construction and Verification. Int. Series in Computer Science. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1986)

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  2. Dijkstra, E.W.: The Saddleback Search. Note EWD-934 (1985), URL: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/index09xx.html

  3. Gries, D.: The Science of Programming. Springer, Heidelberg (1981)

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  4. Graham, R.L., Knuth, D.E., Patashnik, O.: Concrete Mathematics. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1989)

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bird, R.S. (2006). Improving Saddleback Search: A Lesson in Algorithm Design. In: Uustalu, T. (eds) Mathematics of Program Construction. MPC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4014. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11783596_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11783596_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35631-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35632-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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