1963–64 Beşiktaş J.K. season

Prune and search is a method of solving optimization problems suggested by Nimrod Megiddo in 1983.

The basic idea of the method is a recursive procedure in which at each step the input size is reduced ("pruned") by a constant factor 0 < p < 1. As such, it is a form of decrease and conquer algorithm, where at each step the decrease is by a constant factor. Let n be the input size, T(n) be the time complexity of the whole prune-and-search algorithm, S(n) is the time complexity of the pruning step, then T(n) obeys the following recurrence relation:

$T(n)=S(n)+T(n(1-p)),\,$

which has the solution T(n) = O(S(n)), since summing a geometric series only multiplies by a constant factor, namely $1/(1-(1-p))=1/p.$

In particular, Megiddo himself used this approach in his linear time algorithm for the linear programming problem when the dimension is fixed and for the minimal enclosing sphere problem for a set of points in space.

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