information:filtering, quality:corruption, structural:expansion
Description

The algorithm may informally be described as performing the following steps:

In more detail, it may be implemented following the pseudocode below.

As described above, the starting vertex for the algorithm will be chosen arbitrarily, because the first iteration of the main loop of the algorithm will have a set of vertices in Q that all have equal weights, and the algorithm will automatically start a new tree in F when it completes a spanning tree of each connected component of the input graph. The algorithm may be modified to start with any particular vertex s by setting C to be a number smaller than the other values of C (for instance, zero), and it may be modified to only find a single spanning tree rather than an entire spanning forest (matching more closely the informal description) by stopping whenever it encounters another vertex flagged as having no associated edge.

Different variations of the algorithm differ from each other in how the set Q is implemented: as a simple linked list or array of vertices, or as a more complicated priority queue data structure. This choice leads to differences in the time complexity of the algorithm. In general, a priority queue will be quicker at finding the vertex v with minimum cost, but will entail more expensive updates when the value of C changes.