If you’re trying to learn about computer algorithms, or explain them to someone else, three computer scientists have built some helpful visual aids in the style of IKEA instructions.
Image by Sándor P. Fekete, Sebastian Morr, and Sebastian Stiller
Sándor P. Fekete, Sebastian Morr, and Sebastian Stiller have created six diagrams so far, explaining public key cryptography, binary search, merge sort, balance trees, graph scans, and Fleury’s algorithm for one-stroke drawings.
Some explanations are clearer than others and all are most useful in conjunction with some more traditional explanations. As a layperson, I found the public key and merge-sort diagrams the most helpful, partly because they’re the most concrete.
Also check out a similar diagram for a packing algorithm, which fits circles into other shapes, created by Morr for his master’s thesis.
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