How does this work? Like other Dynamic Programming Problems, the algorithm calculate shortest paths in bottom-up manner. It first calculates the shortest distances which have at-most one edge in the path. Then, it calculates shortest paths with at-most 2 edges, and so on. After the i-th iteration of outer loop, the shortest paths with at most i edges are calculated. There can be maximum |V| – 1 edges in any simple path, that is why the outer loop runs |v| – 1 times. The idea is, assuming that there is no negative weight cycle, if we have calculated shortest paths with at most i edges, then an iteration over all edges guarantees to give shortest path with at-most (i+1) edges