Algorithms Technology & Digital Applications 5

Question 1

A social media platform detects communities of users who interact heavily with each other. Which algorithm family solves this?

Accepted Answer

Graph clustering algorithms

Answer

Graph clustering algorithms like Louvain or Girvan-Newman detect densely connected communities within a social graph.

Question 2

A plagiarism detector compares a submitted essay against millions of documents. Which algorithm efficiently finds common substrings?

Accepted Answer

Longest Common Subsequence (LCS)

Answer

LCS finds the longest shared sequence between two strings, making it ideal for plagiarism detection.

Question 3

A stock trading platform must execute sell orders at the best available price instantly. Which data structure enables this?

Accepted Answer

Max-heap order book

Answer

A max-heap order book keeps the highest bid price at the root, enabling O(1) access to the best available price.

Question 4

A delivery company needs to visit 10 warehouses and return to the start with minimum total distance. This is an instance of which problem?

Accepted Answer

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)

Answer

The Traveling Salesman Problem asks for the shortest tour that visits every node exactly once and returns to the origin.

Question 5

A phone contacts app shows suggestions as you type each letter. What time complexity should the lookup ideally achieve per character typed?

Accepted Answer

O(k) where k is the word length

Answer

A Trie lookup traverses one node per character typed, giving O(k) complexity independent of the total number of contacts.

Algorithms Practice Test