SlowFaster, a User Friendly Program for Slow Fast Analysis and Its Form

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the classic way to traverse a linked list is to put a pointer on the head and to use a loop that keeps running while the pointer is not null but what if that pointer never becomes null we would have an infinite loop this case happens when there is a cycle when there is a node that points to a previous note a reasonable thing to do then is to check if the linked list that we're about to traverse doesn't have a cycle in it to avoid the infinite loop and that's why we need a cycle detection algorithm the first solution that may come in your mind to detect a cycle in a linked list is to use a set of visited nodes and if we step on a node that is already in this set it means that we've seen it before so there is a cycle we return that node in code we put a pointer on the head we create a set of visited notes then while the pointer is not null if we find it in visited then we return it because we found the cycle we already visited the actual node else we just put the actual node in visited a