Glossary

Two Pointers

Pair of indices scanning a sequence to find pairs or partitions.

Sliding Window

Maintain a contiguous window with O(1) updates for subarray/substring goals.

Binary Search

Halve a monotonic search space each step.

Dynamic Programming

Solve overlapping subproblems via memoization or tabulation.

Union Find

Disjoint-set structure for connectivity queries and merges.

BFS

Level-order graph/tree exploration; shortest path in unweighted graphs.

DFS

Deep recursive exploration for components, paths, and search trees.

Trie

Prefix tree for efficient string dictionary operations.

Heap

Priority queue supporting extract-min/max in logarithmic time.

Kadane

Linear-time maximum subarray via local optimal running sums.