Hello, Oh, no I do not have 3D grid I have only points. To clear: My task is following: Find the cluster of the points in 3D. There is a known algorithm widely used in astrophysics: Friends of Friends (FOF)( for ex: http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/tools/afof.html). You link in to the group all particles with given the distance (linking length - LL). The more general extended method is MST (minimum spanning tree) based groups. So you link particles in 3d with only closest neighbor. Then you cut and separate all groups by given maximum LL. I would like to implement this algorithm by BGL.
Using STL stack sorted by distance I can make pairs and put them one by one to the graph (your suggestion #3) , but I would like to know for more efficient way to do it.
What do you mean using a stack? Are you not using the cell-list-based algorithm described in the paper you linked to? Are you going to be mutating the graph after you create it, or is the graph going to be a static representation of the points within a given range? If it is going to be static, I would recommend creating a compressed_sparse_row_graph and then using its add_edge function (faster than the one in adjacency_list but requires the edges to be sorted) to build the graph. Please use the version from Boost's SVN head, though, since it has looser sorting requirements (the out edges of a vertex do not need to be sorted by target). You probably already can create the edges sorted by source vertex; if not, there are other options available within the CSR format, or you can just add edges to an adjacency_list like you're currently planning to do. Note that the CSR graph is only for directed graphs right now; undirected graphs will either require inserting each edge as two separate edges or using adjacency_list. Is that closer to answering your question? -- Jeremiah Willcock