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by tejtm 647 days ago
By never finding a cycle, it proves the graph is a DAG.
1 comments

But you have to run it on a sequence, or perhaps even more accurately, something that is putatively a sequence but may have an infinite loop in it. Tortoise & hare requires an unambiguous "next" function, which a graph does not have. Modifying it to not require that so it can run on a graph may be possible but that would constitute a different algorithm for sure, with different complexity analysis, etc.