The extremality principle is one of the commonly used problem solving strategies. It involves looking at the extremal cases of a problem in order to obtain insight about the general structure. Though the principle is widely known, its use in designing algorithms is rarely discussed in CS literature. We present a methodology based on the extremality principle that is useful in solving a wide variety of algorithmic problems. We illustrate the effectiveness of the methodology by deriving solutions to three difficult problems. We believe that the key steps involved in our methodology can be taught to students as individual drills. We have anecdotal evidence for the teachability of the method. Copyright © 2014 ACM.
CITATION STYLE
Jagadish, M., & Iyer, S. (2014). Problem-solving using the extremality principle. In ITICSE 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference (pp. 87–92). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2591708.2591718
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.