language: en

A Randomized Linear-Time Algorithm for Finding Minimum Spanning Trees

Philip N. Klein Robert E. Tarjan
October 12, 1993

Abstract We present a randomized linear-time algorithm for finding a minimum spanning tree in a connected graph with edge weights. The algorithm is a modification of one proposed by Karger and uses random sampling in combination with a recently discovered linear-time algorithm for verifying a minimum spanning tree. Our computational model is a unit-cost random-access machine with the restriction that the only operations allowed on edge weights are binary comparisons.

1 Introduction