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lurker14 on Sept 7, 2012 | parent | context | favorite | on: Damn Cool Algorithms: Cardinality Estimation

Direct link to the pre-generalized: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~moore/best-ideas/mjrty/index.html

Note that this algorithms fails silently if there is not majority element, which limits the scope of its utility.

I assume that the reason it took so long to discover is that no one needed the solution before. Are there applications that can benefit form this algorithm?

beder on Sept 7, 2012 [–]

You can do a second pass over the list to check that your solution is actually a majority element. This maintains the linear time and constant space properties.

justincormack on Sept 7, 2012 | [–]

Unfortunately single pass is usually the binding constraint eg real time data processing.

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