bipartite

What is a scenario in which bipartite graphs occur, and why not ask how that would be dealt with?

Describe an algorithm that determines if a graph is bipartite.

I don't even remember what bipartite means [see edit below].

Equivalently, a bipartite graph is a graph that does not contain any odd-length cycles.

Knowing how to recognize a bipartite graph means that when there's one around you're likely to think - hmm, I wonder if that's bipartite?

The bipartite-graph question isn't -- but most people will have never seen that particular question in class, either.

I agree that you very rarely run into real-world problems that look like a traveling salesman or bipartite test etc.

Sorry, memorising an algorithm for determining if a graph is bipartite pushed that knowledge clean out of my head...no doubt I'm very stupid.

I don't have data to back me up, but I believe that it's more common to simply not need to know what a bipartite graph is, or even a majority set of these topics.

Basically, I implemented a bipartite graph producing algorithm that took the "obvious, low hanging fruit" first, and only worked for a set amount of time.

It was interesting to me since he just pointed out that something was a maximum cardinality problem on a bipartite graph and then applies the Hopcroft-Karp algorithm [1].

Show me a CS graduate who knows by memory the bipartite graph algorithm, and this may be just some guy that has study discipline and good memory but is clueless about the core ideas of graphs and will have forgotten everything after a couple years of graduation.

Now take somebody who can sketch the code for bipartite testing, even when given a problem that does not use the word "bipartite" or even the word "graph" -- so the student needs to identify the proposed problem as a specific graph problem, and then deduce the algorithm in order to solve the graph problem -- and that's somebody I would hire, either for a software engineer position or for a professor position.