While working on a geometry problem, I encountered a technique called the sliding window algorithm.
What exactly does this algorithm involve, and can you provide some clear examples or use cases where it’s especially useful, such as optimizing array or string processing tasks?
Sliding window is one of my go-to techniques for optimizing problems that involve arrays or strings especially when you’re dealing with contiguous subarrays.
Instead of recalculating data from scratch for every window, you “slide” across the array by adding the new element and removing the old one.
It’s perfect for things like finding the max sum of k consecutive elements or checking substrings in a string for some condition.
I started using the sliding window algorithm a lot while practicing problems like “Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters” or “Maximum Sum Subarray of Size K”.
It’s basically a way to move a fixed-size (or dynamic) window across your data, so you avoid nested loops and keep things efficient—often down to O(n).
Huge time saver for anything sequential.