Bellman ford queue based approach from Sedgewick and Wayne - Algorithms, 4th edition

Question

I was studying queue-based approach for Bellman-Ford algorithmfor single source shortest path from Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne - Algorit

Answer 1

1. You are right. In their online materials, authors explain that they check every Vth call in order to amortize the cost of building the associated edge-weighted digraph and finding the cycle in it:

Accordingly, to implement negativeCycle() BellmanFordSP.java builds an edge-weighted digraph from the edges in edgeTo[] and looks for a cycle in that digraph. To find the cycle, it uses EdgeWeightedDirectedCycle.java, a version of DirectedCycle.java from Section 4.3, adapted to work for edge-weighted digraphs. We amortize the cost of this check by performing this check only after every Vth call to relax().

In other words, you can check more often, but then you risk performance loss.

2. Again, you are right. The existence of the negative cycle is currently checked in while loop in the constructor. However, in the worst case the relax method can detect the cycle by checking first edge in the for loop, and instead of exiting it will continue and check other edges (max V-2 of them). With your suggested improvement that can save significant amount of time.