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The Power of Algorithms pp 85–105Cite as

The Quest for the Shortest Route

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Abstract

Finding the shortest route is a ubiquitous problem in our daily life. Whenever we look for driving directions, surf the Web, send emails, or interact with our contacts in a social network, we are, perhaps unwittingly, exploiting the efficiency of an underlying shortest path algorithm. In this chapter, we review the basic ideas which are at the heart of shortest path algorithms and show how they seem to be related to some of the fundamental questions investigated by philosophers and scientists for centuries, in their effort to understand some of the deep mechanisms that rule the universe.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Andrew V. Goldberg, Chris Harrelson, Haim Kaplan and Renato F. Werneck for making available to us the images in Fig. 4.8.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale, Sapienza Università di Roma, via Ariosto 25, 00185, Roma, Italy

    Camil Demetrescu

  2. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Ingegneria Informatica, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”, via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Roma, Italy

    Giuseppe F. Italiano

Authors
  1. Camil Demetrescu
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  2. Giuseppe F. Italiano
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Correspondence to Camil Demetrescu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università di Roma "La Sapienza" Dip. di Informatica e Sistemistica, Rome, Italy

    Giorgio Ausiello

  2. Università di Roma "La Sapienza" Dipartimento di Informatica, Rome, Italy

    Rossella Petreschi

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Demetrescu, C., Italiano, G.F. (2013). The Quest for the Shortest Route. In: Ausiello, G., Petreschi, R. (eds) The Power of Algorithms. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39652-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39652-6_4

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39652-6

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