Algorithm Paper due soon, need ideas

i pretty much googled myself to death searching for a topic, but came empty..

has anyone here done a INTERESTING paper on a algorithm? if so what algorithm was it about?

I recently wrote a paper about a couple algorithms...but it sucked.

What type of algorithm do you need? A sort of obvious topic (no pun intended) is sorting algorithms because a *world* of work has been done on them, and much of it is fascinating. (Mergesort and heapsort are two efficient algorithms that aren't quicksort).

Another interesting class of algorithms is symbol table algorithms because there's a wide variety of them with different properties (e.g., hash tables, tree algorithms).

On a smaller scale, you have priority queue algorithms, which aren't as widely useful as those two, but are really cool. Heaps and binomial queues are two fun ones to look into.

If you want something more involved (and modern), I might suggest algorithms for solving propositional satisfiability (given a Boolean circuit with one output, can you make the output "true" by setting the inputs properly?), which is a pretty hard problem (there isn't likely to be any truly efficient method). There is also a wide variety of these (e.g., resolution, Davis-Putnam search, local search).

erm..u can try the shortest path algorithm..i did for my past assignment..there's a lot of 'em..the most important one is djikstra... good luck to u..