
Ask HN: Most interesting/important algorithms developed in the last decade? - aheilbut
What's your new favorite algorithm or data structure that was invented this decade?<p>I'll nominate the FM-index (2000) based on the BWT (1996), which has enabled some wondrously fast mapping software for DNA sequencing applications.
======
simon_
It's a tiny bit more than 10 years old now, but one of my favorite algorithms,
period, is John Platt's Sequential Minimal Optimization.
(<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299094.299105>)

It was a huge advancement to the state of the art in training SVMs.

------
hga
This is not my field, but the hash array mapped trie from 2000-1
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_array_mapped_trie>) is the source of
Clojure's "secret sauce" that is its answer to the functional programming
trivial update problem. Updates are O(N) where N is a max of 32 and more
likely 5-6, according to Rich Hickey.

