Boyer and Moore: fast string searching

What changed

Used right-to-left comparisons plus bad-character and good-suffix shifts to skip text positions efficiently.

Scientific scope

The record is the exact two-author 1977 Communications of the ACM paper. Its assumptions and reported complexity do not absorb later worst-case refinements, small-alphabet variants, approximate matching or every implementation called Boyer-Moore.

Evidence

The linked sources identify this contribution and its scope. WRS has not independently reconstructed the scientific claims. The record is the exact two-author 1977 Communications of the ACM paper. Its assumptions and reported complexity do not absorb later worst-case refinements, small-alphabet variants, approximate matching or every implementation called Boyer-Moore.

Contributors

• Robert S. Boyer · SCIENCE: Named source author of the scoped work; individual effort shares are not measured.
• J. Strother Moore · SCIENCE: Named source author of the scoped work; individual effort shares are not measured.

• J. Strother Moore author page for Boyer-Moore
• Crossref metadata for Boyer-Moore paper

Provisional WRS assessment, edition 2026-10-16.1. Independent expert calibration is pending. This grade does not certify correctness or assign ownership.

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