A Beginner’s Guide to the Bellman-Ford Algorithm
Understanding the Working, Advantages, and Use Cases of the Algorithm for Finding Shortest Paths in Weighted Graphs | Karthikeyan Nagaraj
7 min readMar 2, 2023
Introduction
- In computer science, algorithms are essential tools that help solve complex problems in a structured and efficient way.
- One such algorithm is the Bellman-Ford Algorithm, which is used to find the shortest path between two nodes in a weighted graph.
- This algorithm was named after its inventors, Richard Bellman and Lester Ford Jr., who first described it in their 1958 paper “A New Algorithm for Shortest Paths”.
What is Bellman-Ford Algorithm?
- The Bellman-Ford Algorithm is a single-source shortest-path algorithm that finds the shortest path from a source vertex to all other vertices in a weighted graph.
- A weighted graph is a graph in which each edge has a weight or cost associated with it. The algorithm works by relaxing each edge in the graph multiple times, gradually refining the estimates of the shortest path until the optimal solution is found.
