# algorithms

## String Deduplication on the Type Level

The string deduplication problem is a canonical one within computer science, serving a similar purpose as fizz-buzz in terms of being an example of a simple problem that a reasonably knowledgable practitioner should be able to solve with minimal effort. The problem appears in a few variants, but briefly one such variant is to remove duplicate letters in a given string, such that the string then has only one instance of any given letter.

## Dijkstra's Shunting Yard in Typescript

The shunting yard algorithm converts infix expressions (i.e. 1+2) into reverse Polish notation, i.e. 1 2 +, which lends itself well to execution on a stack machine. An aside: I wanted to revisit this algorithm because it was one of the first I implemented in C during self-study five years ago. In a way, reimplementing it is a way of measuring my progress since then. The internal details aren’t too complicated - it’s based on the simple pseudo-code of the Wikipedia article describing the shunting yard algorithm.

## Pythagorean Triple Problem in Sub-linear Time

The Pythagorean triple problem is as follows. Given an input integer $$n$$, return integers $$a$$, $$b$$, $$c$$ such that the two following conditions hold: $$a b c = n$$ $$a^2 + b^2 = c^2$$ I was interested in finding a solution to this problem that was both succint and had good asymptotic complexity. The solution I found runs in O(sqrt(n)) time by deconstructing the problem into the well-known 3SUM problem.