Applying Textbook Data Structures for Real Life Wins
A few years back I had a traveling salesperson problem, I googled a bit, and somehow didn't find anything interesting, so I just created a random loop, and randomly mutated it until it got better. A few months ago I discovered a neat little heuristic: the best loop never self-intersect. And a few days ago, I found that there is a definite algorithm that gives a result whose worst case is bounded WRT to the optimal.<p>My question is how do you find all those algorithms? Wikipedia never really feel like a good introductory nor discovery place. In particular, some problems have been perfectly studied by scholars, but you don't find them because you have not found the keywords that will direct google in your search. And I am not a researcher, so I don't keep a tab on a domain, I'm a jack of all trades, I work on a wide set of things.