Chapter 12: Greedy Algorithms

"Local optimization does not guarantee global perfection."

🏛️ The Academic View

Greedy algorithms make the locally optimal choice at each step.

🏗️ The Engineering Reality

Sometimes "Good Enough" is perfect. Greedy algorithms are essential for compression (Huffman) and approximations where exact solutions take too long.

Key Topics: * Huffman Coding: Reducing file size by analyzing frequency. * The Knapsack Approximation: When to stop looking for the perfect packing.