[bogdanoff_2]

This kind of stuff fascinates me. General software engineering seems comparatively boring. I was considering going back to university to do a phd in cs and this is making me realize that research in algorithms/data structure would actually be viable (still lots of stuff to discover).

Does anyone here know what it is like doing research in these areas? Any general advice?

[xtracto]

I've got a PhD in CS, and these structures fascinate me as well. The Bloomier Filter reads amazing.

Unfortunately, day to day job has almost nothing to do with these algorithms, but mainly software architecture and maintainability.

I think the majority of these algorithms are not really something you will find implementing in day to day work. And at most I can see myself using a library with one of those. Even if you do research, it will have to be very focused on data structures and algorithms to really get deep into some of these.

Still, very enjoyable.

[sterlind]

Just today I finished implementing radix heaps in C# to optimize some of my Dijkstras.. When I googled I saw zero implementations in C#, so I may be the first to write it. It worked well, giving me 3x speedup in practice over DAry heap and very low GC pressure, fortunate as my process was exceeding 256GB ram.

Rolling your own data structures is pretty vital if you're working on algorithms.

[bhaak]

> I think the majority of these algorithms are not really something you will find implementing in day to day work. And at most I can see myself using a library with one of those.

That's true but if you don't know what's possible, it's likely that you don't even look for it or stumble over it randomly.

So you should know about them, even if you never implement them. You wouldn't need to know about them in that detail for that but it's just plain fun to learn stuff like this. :-)