Algorithms Under a Handicap

A field guide to the algorithm series on this site, read as one collection. Each series works under a handicap, one thing the usual algorithms course assumes you have but that a real problem takes away: the future (online algorithms), memory (streaming), tractable time (approximation), certainty (randomized), an honest passive input (algorithmic game theory), or general efficiency (parameterized complexity), with amortized analysis as the shared accounting and the DSA patterns as the vocabulary underneath. The point of reading them together is that they are not six separate subjects but a handful of moves in different costumes: bound the unknowable optimum by a computable proxy, the potential method as a bank account for work, concentration bounds, the adversary as a recurring design character, and the habit of finding a resource where there seemed to be only a constraint. Pick the handicap that matches your problem and walk in through that door.