Back in March last year I presented an implementation of Heap’s Algorithm – an algorithm devised to generate all permutations of a set of items – in JavaScript. The article was interesting to write because in doing so I had found a bug in the pseudo-code on the Wikipedia page for the algorithm, which led to a discussion with the main editor for the page on how to make it better. […]
READ MOREThis evening I wanted to solve a particular problem, and it required me – or so I thought – to permute an array of items. Back in the day I wrote an article for PCPlus on the subject and mentioned in there Heap’s algorithm. I hasten to add here that “Heap” here is not the traditional computer science heap, or even the application memory heap, but B.R. Heap, who first formulated and published this algorithm in 1963 (pdf). […]
READ MOREI write a monthly column for PCPlus, a computer news-views-n-reviews magazine in the UK (actually there are 13 issues a year — there's an Xmas issue as well — so it's a bit more than monthly). The column is called Theory Workshop and appears in the back of every issue. When I signed up, my editor and the magazine were gracious enough to allow me to reprint the articles here after say a year or so. After all, the PDFs do appear on each issue's DVD after a couple of months. […]
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