Can we modify Floyd-Warshall and have dist[u][u] = shortest distance from u to itself?
Floyd-Warshall is initialized with dist[u][u] = 0 , can we do dist[u][u] = INF and run a default implementation of Floyd-Warshall hoping that dist[u][u] is the shortest distance from u to u? (i.e the minimum weight cycle)?
Does this works for both directed and undirected graphs?
I'm taking for a default implementation something like wikipedia:
let dist be a |V| × |V| array of minimum distances initialized to ∞ (infinity) 2 for each vertex v 3 dist[v][v] ← 0 4 for each edge (u,v) 5 dist[u][v] ← w(u,v) // the weight of the edge (u,v) 6 for k from 1 to |V| 7 for i from 1 to |V| 8 for j from 1 to |V| 9 if dist[i][j] > dist[i][k] + dist[k][j] 10 dist[i][j] ← dist[i][k] + dist[k][j] 11 end if
Apparently it works for directed graphs. Is there a way to modify Floyd-Warshall and find the minimum weight cycle?
The problem with this approach for undirected graphs is:
If your undirected graph is a tree, there are no cycles right? Suppose there is a edge (u,v) whose weight is dist[u][v] = dist[v][u] = 1. (remember that with the 'modification' dist[u][u] = INF and not zero anymore)
The at iteration i = j = u and k = v:
dist[i][j] > dist[i][k] + dist[k][j] => dist[u][u] > dist[u][v] + dist[v][u] => INF > 1 + 1
So dist[u][u] = 2. But the distance from u to itself cant be 2, because the graph has no cycles (it is a tree)!
Using Floyd Warshall will work if the graph has directed edges. If the graph is undirected, then the answer will always be 2*minEdge, because for every node you can take one path to another node and return.