This is the first post in (hopefully) a series of posts on Damn Cool Algorithms - essentially, any algorithm I think is really Damn Cool, particularly if it’s simple but non-obvious. BK-Trees, or Burkhard-Keller Trees are a tree-based data structure engineered for quickly finding near-matches to a string, for example, as used by a spelling checker, or when doing a ‘fuzzy’ search for a term. The aim is to return, for example, “seek” and “peek” if I search for “aeek”. What makes BK-Trees so cool is that they take a problem which has no obvious solution besides brute-force search, and present a simple and elegant method for speeding up searches substantially. more here
23rd Oct, 2007
