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What does "proficiency in algorithms"? mean? that's general question


To me, it means understanding the basics of data structures and algorithms, and knowing when and how to apply them to solve problems.

A couple of examples:

Seeing a sorted list of items and knowing how to find an item in that list most efficiently (binary search) [0].

Looking at a map of cities and the roads connecting them (including distances between cities) and knowing that you can use a graph to represent the cities and use Dijkstra's algorithm [1] to find the shortest path between any two cities.

Essentially, being able to look at a problem and see how that problem can be mapped to (and solved by) a specific type of algorithm, then being able to implement that algorithm to solve the problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm




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