Traditional graph-based solutions

Many computer scientists have etched their names in history by devising elegant solutions to seemingly complex problems involving graphs. However, graphs aren’t just confined to the algorithm books, and graph-based problems are common in the wild. Lots of business problems and scientific research can be boiled down to graph-based problems, on which existing solutions can be implemented to generate the required output. In this section, we’ll talk about the most popular problems in the domain of graphs, a few approaches to solving them, and where these problems are encountered in practical scenarios.

Searching

There are two fundamental approaches when performing a search over a graph: breadth-first and depth-first. Both are means to traverse a graph from a starting point to all nodes that can be reached from the initial node, but the differentiating factor is their approach.

In BFS, the algorithm explores a graph level by level...