Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Dijkstra's in Disguise

Eric Jang, Aug 13, 2018

This post wanders very far from the subject of online learning, but I just found it too interesting to pass. It's also astonishing (to me) that it's characterized as "such a humble technique taught in introductory computer science courses." Times have changed since I was taking those courses! Basically, the author explores 'relaxation' mechanisms for finding the lowest-cost path between two nodes in a graph. This technique can be found in a variety of disciplines - "We have 3 very well-known algorithms (currency arbitrage, Q-learning, path tracing) that independently discovered the principle of relaxation used in shortest-path algorithms."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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