A randomized linear-time algorithm to find minimum spanning trees

  • Authors:
  • David R. Karger;Philip N. Klein;Robert E. Tarjan

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA;Brown Univ., Providence, RI;Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ/ and NEC Research Institute, Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

We present a randomized linear-time algorithm to find a minimum spanning tree in a connected graph with edge weights. The algorithm uses random sampling in combination with a recently discovered linear-time algorithm for verifying a minimum spanning tree. Our computational model is a unit-cost random-access machine with the restriction that the only operations allowed on edge weights are binary comparisons.