could some please help me understand how to find cycles in graphs in laymans terms?
I have read other questions, such as This one and also some of the wikipedia pages, but they seem to descend rather quickly into mathematical jargon.
I have a model of the graph in java, modelling nodes, and 'in' and 'out' edges - and the model knows nodes only connected in one direction, this allows me to find the leaf nodes as a starting point, my plan was to walk back up the graph from each of these leaf nodes, for each "walk", keeping a list of all the other nodes I've found on my route. If I see something already in the list at any point, I'll know I've found a cycle in the graph. This however feels a little simplistic.
I'm sure this is a solved problem, it would just be nice if it could be explained in simple terms.
-ace