Question

Please suggest good project ideas on algorithms.

Answer 1

I'm studying Donald Knuth's 'dancing links' algorithm. I got into it as a possible way to solve Sudoku puzzles, which I haven't the patience to do manually. Here's the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Links and here's the page devoted to the algorithm.

Basically, it's a way to systematically (bit not deterministically) enumerate the partial solutions to a complete coverage problem, like a partially-filled-in sudoku game. One of the things that I don't understand so well is the mapping from Knuth's binary matrix of solutions to a viable sudoku representation. I'd really like to talk with others about it.

Answer 2

Something rarely talked about but really cool is the Burrows-Wheeler transform if you're into data transforms. It's a reversible lexicographic sort - very nifty as a preprocessing step for compression (bzip2 uses it), but quite computationally intensive in the forward transform step.

Answer 3

RSA Encryption.