from Hacker News

Great Algorithms that Revolutionized Computing

by era86 on 2/19/14, 9:09 PM with 29 comments

• by avmich on 2/19/14, 9:55 PM

  Hash tables were highly praised by Knuth as "the invention of the year". If we have binary search in the list, we should have hashes.

• by rumbler on 2/20/14, 12:29 AM

  That inverse square root algorithm is a neat trick, but it did not revolutionize anything.

  In addition to several algorithms already mentioned, I feel that suffix trees and suffix array algorithms should be there as well. They are making all kinds of approximate searches feasible in bioinformatics.

• by cliveowen on 2/19/14, 10:49 PM

  I can't fathom why the Simplex algorithm wasn't included, it's considered, with reason, the most important algorithm of the 19th century.

• by TTPrograms on 2/19/14, 9:44 PM

  ...FFT?

• by bbosh on 2/19/14, 10:44 PM

  I'm not sure you can call the Euclidean algorithm a "computer algorithm", it having been discovered some 2,000 years before computers existed.

• by carlosvega on 2/19/14, 9:32 PM

  What about RSA?

• by michaelochurch on 2/19/14, 10:03 PM

  Let me add: Least Angle Regression.

  It's an efficient way for performing Lasso (L^1-penalization) to regression models, which has the benefit of (in addition to reducing risk of overfitting) producing sparse models.