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Find the Longest Path

switchbg · 57.3K views · 2010-01-14 · 2:02

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Overview

Find the Longest Path is a comedic song by Daniel J. Barrett, a Billy Joel parody that describes the NP-hard longest path problem in informal terms.

On Hacker News

HN shares it as a fun, memorable way to explain the longest path problem and as an entry in lists of programming and math songs.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2021–2026

Topics

Satire & parodyComputability & complexity theoryAlgorithms & data structures
Search by tags
longest pathparody songcomplexitygraph theorynp-hard

What people said

wpasc · 2021-07 · Recommendation

Haha please do, a video would be great. Your song reminded me of the song: "Find the Longest Path" which you may get a kick out of: [VIDEO]

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saghm · 2026-05 · Reference

Finding the longest path in a graph is itself a pretty well-described NP-complete problem: [LINK] Alternately, you can listen to a Billy Joel parody that describes the problem in decidedly less academic terms: [VIDEO]

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seniorsassycat · 2021-11 · Reference

Stan Rogers has a knack for writing songs that sound older than himself, this song shows he doesn't need nautical themes to do it. Some other programming and math songs Kill -9 [LINK] Find the longest path [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by switchbg, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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