Critical Paths
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Keep it simple, as long as it still works. This should be the main guiding motto of everyone in the world. If you need to solve a problem that looks complicated, think of a method to simplify it, and resolve it with some simple and easy algorithm that everyone may comprehend if necessary. Thankfully, the critical path determination technique is based on this simple idea.
For those of you who periodically check back for another article about graphs, welcome back. This is the tenth part of a 13-part series. As I promised last week, the topic for today will be critical paths. For the others who just arrived here, on this specific technique let me state that this article is part of my article series related to the domain of graphs.
In order to understand the article you will absolutely need to have a general concept of graphs, and you should have read my article about the Shortest Path Algorithms in Graphs. More specifically, you will need to understand the algorithm based on topological order.
The problem itself is probably harder to understand than to see through its solution. Therefore, in the first section of the article I am going to focus on presenting the issue. Most importantly, we'll see how we can simplify it by translating it to a graph. After we are done with this, I shall continue with the strategy we will apply to solve it.
Finally, I will present all this implemented in the C language (and some minimal usage of the C++ language for the presence of references), and show you how we can print out the solution from the data generated in the step before. Let us get on with it!
Next: The problem and translating it >>
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