Nijenhuis and Wilf: Combinatorial Algorithms
Nijenhuis and Wilf's Combinatorial Algorithms, published by Academic
Press in 1978,
specializes in algorithms for constructing basic combinatorial
objects such as permutations, subsets, and partitions; both randomly and
sequentially.
Such algorithms are often very short but hard to locate and
usually are surprisingly subtle.
Fortran programs for all of the algorithms are provided, as well as a
discussion of the theory behind each of them.
The programs are usually short enough that it is reasonable to translate
directly into a more modern programming language, as I did with many of
them in writing
Combinatorica.Descriptions of more recent algorithms for several problems, without code,
are provided in Wilf's Combinatorial Algorithms, an update,
published by SIAM in 1989.
These programs are now available here on our algorithm repository WWW site.
We tracked them down from Neil Sloane, who had them on a magnetic
tape where the authors did not!
In their book, Nijenhuis and Wilf set the proper standard of statistically
testing the output distribution of each of the random generators to establish
that they really appear uniform.
We encourage you to do the same before using these programs to verify that
nothing has been lost in transit.
Download Files (local site)Herbert Wilf's Home PageSite to download the textbook
Problem Links
This page last modified on 2008-07-10
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