the sequence at different speeds. It is also called the "tortoise and the hare algorithm", alluding to Aesop's fable of The Tortoise and the Hare.

The algorithm is named after Robert W. Floyd, who was credited with its invention by Donald Knuth. However, the algorithm does not appear in Floyd's published work, and this may be a misattribution: Floyd describes algorithms for listing all simple cycles in a directed graph