Start Doing Graph Theory

(vertex.degree)

172 points | by ibobev 4 days ago

11 comments

  • gortok 3 minutes ago
    A problem I didn’t even conceive of a year ago was whether or not a book was written by a human.

    This author has done nothing to deserve that scrutiny, but I can’t escape the feeling now of having to be guarded when I see a new book online with a relatively short history (spring 2026 is the earliest version of this text), as I can’t be sure it’s either “AI-enhanced” or AI-written.

    I don’t like this feeling and it dampers any enthusiasm I once had for being excited about stuff like this.

    That aside, if the author did write this themselves without AI, kudos to them and their acheivement!

  • hackerbrother 52 minutes ago
    Cool. I am applying to jobs and it seems graph theory is popular in the "Leet Code" questions pace. So very timely, thank you! And clever domain name :)
  • mcv 30 minutes ago
    I've been doing a lot with graphs over the past couple of years. Basically since I started using neo4j, although not everything involves neo4j directly. I've developed a number of really interesting graph algorithms, but I'm always a bit disappointed by how little use I get out of my graph theory knowledge. I've never needed a Hamilton path or do something with the degrees of my vertices. It's all just logic and intuition.

    But maybe I should read this to see if there's anything that applies to my current work.

  • matt_daemon 15 minutes ago
    If you like graph theory Dijkstra’s in Disguise is a great read: https://blog.evjang.com/2018/08/dijkstras.html

    Related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745779

  • armcat 29 minutes ago
    Graphs are fantastic - PageRank [1] that powered Google Search (still does to some extent), TextRank for extractive text summarisation [2], Louvain for neighbourhood detection [3] all use graphs, as well as tonnes of others like belief propagation, Markov clustering, A*, and so on. So yeah, learn it.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

    [2] https://aclanthology.org/W04-3252.pdf

    [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvain_method

  • igleria 2 hours ago
    not super fond of my memories of having to come up with a graph demonstration on a fixed time on a paper exam, but at least I can say I was once a person that could do that!
  • ultimaterr 12 minutes ago
    what applications is this useful for? node topology is already a solved problem for decentralized networks since most validators are on aws. unless this is for fun? theres finite space to order nodes topologically speaking tbh
  • vorobeez 1 hour ago
    It's unfortunate that the book doesn't have solutions for practice problems. Which makes it hard to use for self-learning.
    • OgsyedIE 1 hour ago
      The book you want in this case is Gross, Yellen & Anderson, Graph Theory and its Applications, 3rd Edition.

      There are plenty of ways to get a copy.

    • eru 1 hour ago
      You can ask Claude for the solutions?
      • vorobeez 41 minutes ago
        Sure I can. But from my experience solutions in math books usually continue learning process and can provide even more insight to a problem. Solutions from ChatGPT or Claude barely can replace that.

        (Edit) But I understand that goal of a book can be completely different. So it's just problem of my expectations.

        • karmakurtisaani 29 minutes ago
          For elaborating something unclear they're great tho.
      • Gormo 57 minutes ago
        If you don't have the solutions, how do you verify Claude's work?
        • DecoPerson 52 minutes ago
          Everything, except the bleeding edge and situations requiring the context window to be more than 60% filled, are elementary to Opus 5.5 . If you provide the questions completely, you can be very sure that Claude’s solutions will be correct. The world has changed; AI is reliable; we need to adapt.
        • deredede 53 minutes ago
          According to current practices, you ask ChatGPT or DeepSeek to verify it.
          • Gormo 4 minutes ago
            Turtles all the way down, I guess.
  • throwaw12 1 hour ago
    that background is so annoying to my eyes when scrolling the content, would be great if author can fix it
  • rdevilla 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • cedarbyte482 1 hour ago
    This is great, graphs is also the answer to autonomous coding :D
    • roarcher 1 hour ago
      How so?
      • cedarbyte482 1 hour ago
        We have experienced that adverserial review cycles is the only way to really guarantee good outputs from coding agents - best modelled as a cyclic graph.
        • sandos 1 hour ago
          I am even more confused after this answer: Are the nodes actual reviews or something else?
        • eru 1 hour ago
          I don't think modelling this as a graph adds anything that you wouldn't get from the phrase 'adversarial review cycles' already. So graph theory is pretty much useless for this application.

          Please prove me wrong.

          • ultimaterr 4 minutes ago
            what does neuron topology have to do with autonomous coding? MLP problem? doesn't make any sense