In combinatorics, a greedoid is a type of set system.
It arises from the notion of the matroid, which was
originally introduced by Whitney in 1935 to study planar graphs and
was later used by Edmonds to characterize a class of optimization problems
that can be solved by greedy algorithms.
Around 1980, Korte and Lovász introduced the greedoid to further generalize this characterization of greedy algorithms; hence the name greedoid.
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