CS261: A Second Course in Algorithms Lecture #11: Online Learning and the Multiplicative Weights Algorithm∗

For example, in job scheduling problems, one often thinks of the jobs as arriving online (i.e., one-by-one), with a new job needing to be scheduled on some machine immediately. Or in a graph problem, perhaps the vertices of a graph show up one by one (with whatever edges are incident to previously arriving vertices). Thus the meaning of “one piece at a time” varies with the problem, but it many scenarios it makes perfect sense. While online algorithms don’t get any airtime in an introductory course like CS161, many problems in the real world (computational and otherwise) are inherently online problems.