Notes / tag / greedy

#greedy

5 notes

# Data Structures Algorithms

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1 — Greedy Strategy

The greedy-choice property proven by exchange argument instead of assumed on faith, optimal substructure named as the property greedy shares with DP but resolves differently, a canonical coin system proven correct and an adversarial one shown to break the same proof, and 0/1 knapsack as the case where greedy must yield to DP.

data-structures-algorithms greedy book
Jul 31, 2026

2 — Interval Scheduling

Three concrete interval problems — removal, merging, and room counting — built on one recurring decision: which sort key, start, end, or duration, the greedy choice actually needs.

data-structures-algorithms greedy book
Jul 31, 2026

3 — Huffman Coding

Building a provably optimal prefix-free code by repeatedly merging the two least-frequent symbols off a min-heap — the exchange argument behind it, and where this exact construction runs inside gzip, JPEG, and MP3 today.

data-structures-algorithms greedy book
Jul 31, 2026

4 — Activity Selection

Maximizing the count of non-overlapping activities on one resource by sorting on finish time, proved optimal with the book's most rigorous exchange argument.

data-structures-algorithms greedy book
Jul 31, 2026

5 — Fractional Knapsack

Sorting items by value-to-weight ratio and greedily taking the highest-ratio items first, proven optimal by an exchange argument that only holds because items can be split into arbitrary fractions, and a concrete capacity-50 counter-example where that identical ratio-greedy strategy provably loses to 0/1 knapsack's DP the instant items become indivisible.

data-structures-algorithms greedy book
Jul 31, 2026