Introduction Searching for data stored in different data structures is a crucial part of pretty much every single application. There are many different algorithms available to utilize when searching, and each have different implementations and rely on different data structures to get the job done. Being able to choose a specific algorithm for a given task is a key skill for developers and can mean the difference between a fast, reliable and stable application and an application that crumbles from […]

There are multiple ways to solve a problem using a computer program. For instance, there are several ways to sort items in an array. You can use merge sort, bubble sort, insertion sort, etc. All these algorithms have their own pros and cons. An algorithm can be thought of a procedure or formula to solve a particular problem. The question is, which algorithm to use to solve a specific problem when there exist multiple solutions to the problem? Algorithm analysis […]

Introduction Sometimes, data we store or retrieve in an application can have little or no order. We may have to rearrange the data to correctly process it or efficiently use it. Over the years, computer scientists have created many sorting algorithms to organize data. In this article we’ll have a look at popular sorting algorithms, understand how they work and code them in Python. We’ll also compare how quickly they sort items in a list. For simplicity, algorithm implementations would […]

In this article we’ll go over how the run-length encoding algorithm works, what it’s used for, and how to implement its encode and decode functions in Python. Run-length encoding (RLE) is a very simple form of data compression in which a stream of data is given as the input (i.e. “AAABBCCCC”) and the output is a sequence of counts of consecutive data values in a row (i.e. “3A2B4C”). This type of data compression is lossless, meaning that when decompressed, all […]

Introduction Quicksort is a popular sorting algorithm and is often used, right alongside Merge Sort. It’s a good example of an efficient sorting algorithm, with an average complexity of O(nlogn). Part of its popularity also derives from the ease of implementation. We will use simple integers in the first part of this article, but we’ll give an example of how to change this algorithm to sort objects of a custom class. Quicksort is a representative of three types of sorting […]