Shortest-path algorithms which use a space-time tradeoff?

Posted by Chris Mounce on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chris Mounce
Published on 2010-04-27T20:40:51Z Indexed on 2010/04/27 20:43 UTC
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I need to find shortest paths in an unweighted, undirected graph.

There are algorithms which can find a shortest path between two nodes, but this can take time. There are also algorithms for computing shortest paths for all pairs of nodes in the graph, but storing such a lookup table would take lots of disk space.

What I'm wondering: Is there an algorithm which offers a space-time tradeoff that's somewhere between these two extremes? In other words, is there a way to speed up a shortest-path search, while using less disk space than would be occupied by an all-pairs shortest-path table?

I know there are ways to efficiently store lookup tables for this problem, and I already have a couple of ideas for speeding up shortest-path searches using precomputed data. But I don't want to reinvent the wheel if there's already some established algorithm that solves this problem.

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