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computational problems.
And I would expect that most of you do
not currently know good algorithms for
these problems and it would be
challenging to design one.
Third, by the end of this class you will
know efficient algorithms for both of
these problems.
In fact, you'll know something much
better.
You'll know general algorithm design
techniques which solve as a special case
these two problems and have the potential
to solve problems coming up in your own
projects as well.
And one comment before we get started on
these two videos.
They're both at a higher level than most
of the class, by which I mean there won't
be any equations or math.
There won't be any concrete pseudo-code,
and I'll be glossing over lots of
details.
The point is just to convey the spirit of
what we're going to be studying, and to
illustrate the range of applications of
the techniques that we're going to learn.
So what I want to talk about first is
distributed shortest path routing and why
it is fundamental to how the internet
works.
So let me begin with a kind of non very
mathematical claim.
I claim that we can usefully think of the
internet as a graph, as a collection of
verticies and a collection of edges.
So this is clearly an, clearly an
ambiguous statement.
There's many things I might mean as we'll
discuss.
But here's the primary interpretation I
want you to have for this particular
video.
So to specify this, the vertices I intend
to be the end-hosts and the routers of
the internet.
So machines that generate traffic,
machines that consume traffic, and
machines that help traffic get from one
place to another.
So the edges are going to be directed and
they are meant to represent physical or
wireless connections indicating that one
machine can talk directly to another one
by either a physical link between the two
or a direct wireless connection.
So it's common that you'll have edges in
both directions, so that if machine A can
talk to machine B directly, then also
machine B can talk directly to machine A,