List of algorithms

The following is a list of the algorithms described in Wikipedia. See also the list of data structures, list of algorithm general topics and list of terms relating to algorithms and data structures.

If you intend to describe a new algorithm, please read algorithms on Wikipedia first, then add a link to your article and a one-line description here.

Combinatorial algorithms

General combinatorial algorithms

Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm: finds cycles in iterations
(uniformly distributed) Pseudorandom number generators:
- Blum Blum Shub
- Mersenne twister
Robinson-Schensted algorithm: generates permutations from pairs of Young tableaux

Graph algorithms

See main article graph theory

Bellman-Ford algorithm: computes shortest paths in a weighted graph (where some of the edge weights may be negative)
Dijkstra's algorithm: computes shortest paths in a graph with non-negative edge weights
Floyd-Warshall algorithm: solves the all pairs shortest path problem in a weighted, directed graph
Kruskal's algorithm: finds a minimum spanning tree for a graph
Prim's algorithm: finds a minimum spanning tree for a graph
Boruvka's algorithm: finds a minimum spanning tree for a graph
Ford-Fulkerson algorithm: computes the maximum flow in a graph
Edmonds-Karp algorithm: implementation of Ford-Fulkerson
Nonblocking Minimal Spanning Switch say, for a telephone exchange
Spring based algorithm: algorithm for graph drawing
Topological sort

Search algorithms

Linear search: finds an item in an unsorted list
Selection algorithm: finds the kth largest item in a list
Binary search: locates an item in a sorted list
Binary search tree
Breadth-first search: traverses a graph level by level
Depth-first search: traverses a graph branch by branch
Best-first search: traverses a graph in the order of likely importance using a priority queue
A* tree search: special case of best-first search
Predictive search: binary like search which factors in magnitude of search term versus the high and low values in the search. Sometimes called dictionary search or interpolated search.
Hash table: finds an item in an unsorted collection in O(1) time.

String searching algorithms

Sort algorithms

Binary tree sort
Bogosort
Bubble sort: for each pair of indices, swap the items if out of order
Bucket sort
Comb sort
Cocktail sort
Counting sort
Gnome sort
Heapsort: convert the list into a heap, keep removing the largest element from the heap and adding it to the end of the list
Insertion sort: determine where the current item belongs in the list of sorted ones, and insert it there
Merge sort: sort the first and second half of the list separately, then merge the sorted lists
Pancake sorting
Pigeonhole sort
Quicksort: divide list into two, with all items on the first list coming before all items on the second list.; then sort the two lists. Often the method of choice
Radix sort: sorts strings letter by letter
Selection sort: pick the smallest of the remaining elements, add it to the end of the sorted list
Shell sort: an attempt to improve insertion sort
Smoothsort
Stupid sort
Topological sort

Compression algorithms

Arithmetic coding: advanced entropy coding
Burrows-Wheeler transform: preprocessing useful for improving lossless compression
DEFLATE: lossless data compression
Delta encoding: aid to compression of data in which sequential data occurs frequently
Huffman coding: simple lossless compression taking advantage of relative character frequencies
Incremental encoding: delta encoding applied to sequences of strings
LZW: lossless data compression (Lempel-Ziv-Welch)
Run-length encoding: lossless data compression taking advantage of strings of repeated characters
SEQUITUR algorithm: lossless compression by incremental grammar inference on a string

Computational geometry

Gift wrapping algorithm: determining the convex hull of a set of points
Graham scan determining the convex hull of a set of points in the plane
Point in polygon: tests whether a given point lies within a given polygon

Computer graphics

Bresenham's line algorithm: plots points of a 2-dimensional array to form a straight line between 2 specified points (uses decision variables)
DDA line algorithm: plots points of a 2-dimensional array to form a straight line between 2 specified points (uses floating-point math)
Flood fill: fills a connected region of a multi-dimensional array with a specified symbol
Painter's algorithm: detects visible parts of a 3-dimensional scenery
Ray tracing: realistic image rendering

Cryptographic algorithms

(See also Topics in cryptography for an 'analytical glossary')

Symmetric (secret key) encryption:
- Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), winner of NIST competition
- Blowfish
- Data Encryption Standard (DES), sometimes DE Algorithm, winner of NBS selection competition, replaced by AES for most purposes
- IDEA
- RC4 (cipher)
Asymmetric (public key) encryption or digital signature:
Cryptographic Message digest functions:
- MD5 – Note that there is now a method of generating collisions for MD5
- RIPEMD-160
- SHA-1
- HMAC: keyed-hash message authentication
Cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators
- Blum Blum Shub - based on the hardness of factorization
- Yarrow algorithm
- Fortuna, allegedly an improvement on Yarrow
Other
- Diffie-Hellman: key exchange

Distributed systems algorithms

Lamport ordering: a partial ordering of events based on the happened-before relation
Snapshot algorithm: a snapshot is the process of recording the global state of a system
Vector ordering: a total ordering of events

Numerical algorithms

See also main article numerical analysis and list of numerical analysis topics

De Boor algorithm: computes splines.
De Casteljau's algorithm: computes Bezier curves
False position method: approximates roots of a function
Gauss-Jordan elimination: solves systems of linear equations
Gauss-Legendre algorithm: computes the digits of pi
Newton's method: finds zeros of functions with calculus
Gauss-Newton algorithm: find minimum of function of several variables
Jones's period proxy algorithm: factors integers
Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm: find minimum of function of several variables
MISER algorithm: Monte Carlo simulation, numerical integration
Rounding functions: the classic ways to round numbers
Secant method: approximates roots of a function
Shifting nth-root algorithm: digit by digit root extraction
Square root: approximates the square root of a number
Strassen algorithm

Optimization algorithms

Simplex algorithm: An algorithm for solving the linear programming problem
Simulated annealing
Genetic algorithms
Particle swarm
Tabu search
Local search

Digital signal processing

CORDIC: Fast trigonometric function computation technique.
Fast Fourier transform: determines the frequencies contained in a (segment of a) signal
- Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm
Rainflow-counting algorithm: Reduces a complex stress history to a count of elementary stress-reversals for use in fatigue analysis
Osem: algorithm for processing of medical images