If an engineer uses dynamic programming to solve the all-pairs shortest path problem in a directed graph with 500 nodes, what limits its scaling to larger graphs?

💡 Explanation

Dynamic programming algorithms, such as Floyd-Warshall, have quadratic space complexity (O(V^2)), because they store a distance matrix for all node pairs; therefore, the algorithm's memory requirement rapidly exceeds available RAM, rather than being limited by branch prediction, network latency or disk I/O performance.

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