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by daken 4510 days ago
This doesn't make sense to me. You display Dijkstra as an example on your homepage. Imagine I want to use Dijkstra in an app that needs critical performance and calls the function 1000000 times per minute, making this an API rather a library just breaks the whole point of centralizing the algorithms.
1 comments
dalke 4510 days ago
Plus, the choice of Dijkstra algorithm implementation depends on the graph size, type, and even CPU. See http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rezaul/papers/TR-07-54.pdf , with 10 different implementation variations and several different benchmarks.

The 9th DIMACS Implementation Challenge from 8 years ago (see http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/challenge9/ ) served as a way to gather the best algorithms for the shortest path problem. I don't see how this project can be significantly better, or even close to, a traditional effort like that.

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robrenaud 4510 days ago
How many of those shortest paths algorithms can you run right now?

It doesn't have to be better at producing good algorithms. It just has to be better at making those algorithms implementations easy to use.

But I still don't think the business model is viable.

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dalke 4510 days ago
How many do I need to run?

The Boost Graph Library includes three different shortest path implementations, and I have that already downloaded. That library likely fits my needs.

In the DIMACS challenge papers at http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/challenge9/papers.shtml you'll see "Single-Source Shortest Paths with the Parallel Boost Graph Library".

Indeed, the Parallel Boost Graph Library library is easily available, and contains two parallel shortest-path implementations.

The flip question is, what if it doesn't fit my needs? Well, then the question is "what do I need"?

The other DIMACS challenges include 1) pre-computation, which is useful for road-based graphs, 2) supercomputer parallelism to search billions of nodes, 3) out-of-core graph searches, for when you don't have enough RAM, and 4) k-shortest path search.

It's very unlikely that this proposed algorithm service provider will implement these alternate algorithms.

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