Computer science

Alpha–beta pruning accelerates minimax game-tree search by eliminating branches that cannot affect the root value.

Arithmetic coding is a lossless compression technique that represents a sequence of symbols through successive subdivisions of a probability interval.

Binary search locates a value or boundary in an ordered search space by repeatedly eliminating approximately half the remaining candidates.

A bit is a binary digit and a unit of information, fundamental to digital computing, storage, and communication.

Bootstrap aggregating, or bagging, combines models trained on resampled data to stabilize predictions and reduce variance.

Computational complexity studies the resources required to solve computational problems and the limits of efficient computation.

Cryptography studies mathematical methods for protecting information and enabling secure communication and computation in the presence of adversaries.

Data compression encodes information using fewer bits, either preserving the original exactly or allowing controlled loss to reduce storage and transmission requirements.

A data structure organizes information and its relationships to support efficient access, modification, and processing in computer programs.

An algorithm-design paradigm that solves a problem by decomposing it into smaller problems and combining their solutions.

Early stopping limits iterative model training by selecting a stopping point, often using validation performance, to control overfitting and computational cost.

An error-correcting code adds structured redundancy to data so that a decoder can recover information despite certain transmission or storage errors.

Feature selection identifies a subset of input variables to improve predictive modeling, reduce computational or measurement costs, and support interpretation.

Formal verification uses mathematically precise models and logical reasoning to establish that hardware or software satisfies specified properties under explicit assumptions.

A game tree represents possible sequences of moves and outcomes, supporting the analysis of strategic decisions and computer game-playing algorithms.

The halting problem asks whether a program terminates on a given input; no algorithm can answer correctly for every program and input.

A practical problem-solving method that uses estimates or simplified rules to guide decisions without necessarily guaranteeing an optimal result.

A function that estimates the value of a state or the cost of reaching a goal, enabling search algorithms to make decisions without exhaustive exploration.

Huffman coding constructs variable-length prefix codes that minimize average codeword length for a specified symbol distribution.

Information retrieval is the study and practice of finding relevant material in collections in response to an information need.

Lean is an open-source proof assistant and programming language that represents mathematical statements and checks formal proofs using dependent type theory.

A learning rate controls the scale of parameter updates during iterative training, influencing optimization speed, stability, and model performance.

A logic gate implements a Boolean operation on binary signals and serves as a basic building block of digital circuits.

A loop invariant is a property of program state that holds at a designated point before and after every iteration of a loop.

Lossless data compression reduces the size of digital representations while allowing exact reconstruction of the original data.

Minimax is an adversarial search algorithm that selects a move by optimizing its outcome against an opponent assumed to play optimally.

A policy is an agent’s rule for selecting actions from states, observations, or interaction histories in reinforcement learning.

A code in which no codeword is a prefix of another, allowing concatenated codewords to be decoded without lookahead or separators.

A proof assistant is software for constructing and checking formal proofs through human guidance, automated reasoning, and precisely specified logical rules.

Pseudocode is a human-readable description of an algorithm that combines programming constructs, mathematical notation, and ordinary language without requiring executable syntax.

An algorithm that uses random choices during computation, with correctness, running time, or approximation quality analyzed probabilistically.

Recursion defines structures or computations in terms of simpler instances of themselves, providing a foundation for mathematical definitions and many algorithms.

The shortest path problem finds a route of minimum total weight between vertices in a graph, with algorithms determined by graph structure and edge weights.

Space complexity measures how an algorithm’s memory requirements grow with input size, under a specified computational model and accounting convention.

Time complexity describes how the computational work required by an algorithm grows with the size of its input under a specified computational model.