http://www.me.utexas.edu/~bard/IP/Handouts/cycles.pdf

首先，你并不是真的想要找出所有的循环因为如果有1个，那么就会有无穷多个循环。比如A-B-A, A-B-A- b - a等等。或者可以将2个循环组合成一个8-like循环等等……有意义的方法是寻找所有所谓的简单循环——那些除了开始/结束点之外不交叉的循环。如果你愿意，你可以生成简单循环的组合。

One of the baseline algorithms for finding all simple cycles in a directed graph is this: Do a depth-first traversal of all simple paths (those that do not cross themselves) in the graph. Every time when the current node has a successor on the stack a simple cycle is discovered. It consists of the elements on the stack starting with the identified successor and ending with the top of the stack. Depth first traversal of all simple paths is similar to depth first search but you do not mark/record visited nodes other than those currently on the stack as stop points.

The brute force algorithm above is terribly inefficient and in addition to that generates multiple copies of the cycles. It is however the starting point of multiple practical algorithms which apply various enhancements in order to improve performance and avoid cycle duplication. I was surprised to find out some time ago that these algorithms are not readily available in textbooks and on the web. So I did some research and implemented 4 such algorithms and 1 algorithm for cycles in undirected graphs in an open source Java library here : http://code.google.com/p/niographs/ .

顺便说一句，因为我提到了无向图:它们的算法是不同的。构建一棵生成树，然后每一条不属于树的边与树中的一些边一起形成一个简单的循环。这样发现的循环形成了所谓的循环基。所有的简单循环都可以通过组合两个或多个不同的基循环来找到。更多细节请参见:http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/68106/FTL_R_1982_07.pdf。

深度优先搜索和回溯应该在这里工作。 保存一个布尔值数组，以跟踪您以前是否访问过某个节点。如果您没有新节点可访问(不涉及已经访问过的节点)，那么只需返回并尝试不同的分支。

如果你有一个邻接表来表示图，DFS很容易实现。例如adj[A] = {B,C}表示B和C是A的子结点。

例如，下面的伪代码。“start”是开始的节点。

dfs(adj,node,visited):  
  if (visited[node]):  
    if (node == start):  
      "found a path"  
    return;  
  visited[node]=YES;  
  for child in adj[node]:  
    dfs(adj,child,visited)
  visited[node]=NO;

用开始节点调用上面的函数:

visited = {}
dfs(adj,start,visited)

在无向图的情况下，最近发表的一篇论文(无向图中循环和st路径的最优列表)提供了一个渐近最优解。你可以在这里阅读http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2766或http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2627951 我知道它不能回答你的问题，但由于你的问题标题没有提到方向，它可能仍然对谷歌搜索有用

我无意中发现了下面的算法，它似乎比Johnson的算法更有效(至少对于更大的图)。然而，与Tarjan的算法相比，我不确定它的性能如何。 此外，到目前为止，我只检查了三角形。如果感兴趣，请参阅千叶Norishige和西泽木高雄(http://dx.doi.org/10.1137/0214017)的“树状性和子图列表算法”

我发现解决这个问题的最简单的选择是使用名为networkx的python库。

它实现了这个问题的最佳答案中提到的约翰逊算法，但它的执行非常简单。

简而言之，你需要以下几点:

import networkx as nx
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Create Directed Graph
G=nx.DiGraph()

# Add a list of nodes:
G.add_nodes_from(["a","b","c","d","e"])

# Add a list of edges:
G.add_edges_from([("a","b"),("b","c"), ("c","a"), ("b","d"), ("d","e"), ("e","a")])

#Return a list of cycles described as a list o nodes
list(nx.simple_cycles(G))

答案:[['a'， 'b'， 'd'， 'e']， ['a'， 'b'， 'c']]