Introduction to Algorithms, Fourth Edition — solutions to exercises and problems

Overview

The goal of this project is to provide solutions to all exercises and problems from Introduction to Algorithms, Fourth Edition by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein. My intention is to ensure, first and foremost, the rock solid correctness and completeness of the provided content, its technical elegance, as well as its consistency with the textbook material. In order to achieve such reliability, I spend a lot of time evolving and revising the solutions, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of terminology, wording, and typography. I pay attention to providing optimal algorithms, which are then implemented and thoroughly tested, and to illustrate operations and examples with accurate pictures, consistent with the style of the textbook.

It should be noted that the textbook's authors also provide the official Selected Solutions, which cover about 7% of all exercises and problems contained in the book. Additionally, other authors publicly host their solutions on the web, though majority of those that I found are for the third edition of the textbook:

However, none of the above sources cover all exercises, especially when compared to the fourth edition that adds significant number of new exercises. Also, I noticed that certain solutions are not of the highest quality, e.g., some of them are incorrect, incomplete, or just far from elegance. Nevertheless, these pieces of work were sources of inspiration for me, and showed different approaches and perspectives. When relying on the ideas from them, I always aimed to rework the solutions by introducing necessary fixes and improvements, or just polishing them.

The solutions here often refer to the material presented in the textbook, so familiarity on at least a current chapter is required. In many solutions, you will also find references to other tasks, especially when a given task uses the result of another in its own solution. In general, later solutions sometimes rely on the earlier ones by referencing the relevant exercises. Thus, in early chapters one can observe a somewhat greater focus on details, and in later chapters more cross-references to exercises where those details have already been discussed.

I keep an eye on errors or inaccuracies in exercises and problems or the material they directly rely on, and highlight them in short notes before the solution of the affected exercise. On the other hand, I refer to the textbook's errata — if it includes a certain correction, I assume that the bug has already been fixed.

As I stressed earlier, I pay special attention to ensuring the correctness of the algorithms and data structures operations. To maximize my confidence, I implement and test each pseudocode or algorithm description that I provide in the solutions, as well as those that are provided in the textbook. I chose Python as a programming language, because of its popularity and its syntax similar to that used in pseudocodes. The counterpart project with implementations is available here.

The list of provided algorithms.

Detailed project's conventions.

History

The origins of the project date back to 2005, when I started solving exercises by pen and paper, during studying algorithms as a preparation for participating in the Polish Olympiad in Informatics. I was relying on the Polish translation of the textbook's second edition, titled Wprowadzenie do algorytmów, and my solutions were in Polish as well. In 2009 I started rewriting them in LaTeX. The document has evolved since then, with changes involving numerous fixes, improved page layout and styling, as well as open sourcing it on GitHub as CormenSol. At the beginning the pictures were drawn in MetaPost, before having been rewritten to PGF/TikZ in 2016. In 2012 I started implementing algorithms, first in C++, then in Java, before finally settling on Python in 2017, and I open sourced the implementations as CormenPy. Since initiating the project, the textbook got updated to the third edition in 2009, then to fourth edition in 2022. Having solved Chapters 1-17 and Appendices A-C from the — now outdated — second edition, I decided to freeze both CormenSol and CormenPy, and shift my attention to adapt the solutions for the fourth edition, while translating them to English — the process I refer to as migration.

The work on the current project began on January 1, 2023.

Progress

Part I	Part II	Part III	Part IV	Part V	Part VI	Part VII	Part VIII

Roadmap

Building

To compile the project locally you need TeXLive 2021 or newer. On Ubuntu the minimal required set of packages can be installed with:

sudo apt install texlive-pstricks texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-extra latexmk

Additionally, you need to install the MathTime Professional II Lite fonts. Since the fonts are not available in the standard TeXLive distribution, you will need to install them using the provided script:

chmod +x util/install_fonts.sh && sudo util/install_fonts.sh

Once the environment is prepared, you can compile the document to PDF by running the following command:

latexmk -pdf -file-line-error -halt-on-error -interaction=nonstopmode clrs4e-solutions.tex

Contributions

Again, a significant effort has been made to ensure that each solution is thoroughly checked. However, if you have found an error of any kind, or you can improve an existing solution in any way, I will be grateful for your feedback or help. Each exercise and each subproblem has its own issue in this repository, named and categorized appropriately. Please avoid duplicating these issues, rather search for the right one, and leave a comment, or even better — create a pull request with your suggestions. Authors of significant contributions will be credited in the document.

Together let's make this the most complete, reliable and consistent set of solutions to the iconic CLRS!

— Krzysztof Wojtas

wojtask/clrs4e-solutions

wojtask

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