The Dijkstra Algorithm is a popular method used to find the shortest paths from a source node to all other nodes in a weighted graph. It operates on the principle of exploring the least costly path first, utilizing a priority queue to efficiently select the next node to process. The algorithm maintains a set of nodes whose shortest distance from the source is known and iteratively updates the distances to neighboring nodes.
The steps of the algorithm can be summarized as follows:
This algorithm is particularly effective for graphs with non-negative weights, as it guarantees finding the shortest path efficiently, typically with a time complexity of , where is the number of vertices and is the number of edges.
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