The CS Detective ─ An Algorithmic Tale of Crime, Conspiracy, and Computation

Search transforms the essential but challenging topic of search algorithms into a fantasy-noir mystery for the digital age. This is a unique introduction to search algorithms and how they work, written by a Google engineer with specializations in algorithms and machine learning.

Meet Frank Runtime. Disgraced ex-detective. Hard-boiled private eye. Search expert. When the police headquarters is hit with a robbery, Frank and his extensive search skills are called upon to catch the culprits. Pulling out his best algorithms, Frank scours smugglers' boats with binary search, tails spies with a search tree, escapes burning prisons with breadth-first search, and burns down cafeterias with queues. He's joined by know-it-all rookie Officer Notation and Socks the inept wizard as he follows leads in a best-first search that unravels a deep conspiracy. Each chapter introduces a new twist and a new concept, ending with a technical summary.

From finding informants with exhaustive search to lock-picking with priority queues, Frank's mission will give you an understanding of:

• The algorithms behind best-first and depth-first search, iterative deepening, parallelizing, binary search, index inversion, and more
• Basic computational concepts like strings, arrays, stacks, and queues
• How to adapt search algorithms to unusual data structures
• The most efficient algorithm to use in a situation, and when to apply common-sense heuristic methods

For computer science students and amateur sleuths alike, Search is the most efficient route to understanding algorithms.

Jeremy Kubica is a principal engineer at Google working on machine learning and algorithms, with a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in computer science from Cornell. Kubica is the author of the popular Computational Fairy Tales blog.