Understanding topological sort


A graph can be used to model various problems involving relationships between entities and solve them efficiently. Often, when modelling problems using a graph, we end up with a directed graph that does not contain any cycles (a directed acyclic graph). Since these graphs are directed and don't have any cycles, we can define a linear ordering of their nodes such that each node appears before all the other nodes connected to it directly or indirectly via out-edges. Such an ordering is called the topological sort or topological ordering of the graph.

It is important to note that there can be more than one correct topological ordering of a graph.
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The topological ordering of a directed acyclic graph.

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