The Stanford GraphBase

by Donald Knuth

The Stanford GraphBase: A Platform for Combinatorial Computing represents the first fruits of Donald E. Knuth's preparation for Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming. The book's first goal is to demonstrate, through about 30 examples, the art of literate programming. Each example is a programmatic essay, a short story that can be read and enjoyed by human beings as readily as it can be read and interpreted by machines. In these essays/programs, Knuth makes new contributions to the exposition of several important algorithms and data structures, so the programs are of special interest for their content as well as for their style. The book's second goal is to provide a useful means for comparing combinatorial algorithms and for evaluating methods of combinatorial computing. To this end, Knuth's programs offer standard freely available sets of data - the Stanford GraphBase - that may be used as benchmarks to test competing methods. The data sets are both interesting in themselves and