Data Structures and Algorithms COMP2521 23T3

End of Week 1

Posted by Kevin Luxa 🦉 Sunday 17 September 2023, 07:13:46 PM.

Hey everyone,

I hope you enjoyed your first week of term! This week, we covered some important topics that will be relevant in the rest of the term, so here's a recap:

🥞 Recursion

We introduced recursion, which is a technique where we solve problems by solving smaller versions of the same problem, and showed how we can apply it to linked lists. This can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around at first, but don't worry, you'll get plenty of opportunity to practice recursion next week in the tutorial and lab exercise . I've also created walkthroughs of some of the functions we went through in the lecture, you can find them on the Lectures page. If you think you need more help understanding recursion, feel free to come to a help session or consult :)

📈 Analysis of Algorithms

We also covered the basics of analysing the efficiency of algorithms. We will be analysing many algorithms in future lectures, so you don't need to feel like you need to have mastered it now - just make sure you understand the analysis of linear search and binary search in the lecture.

🎤 Lectures

We weren't able to livestream Monday's lecture, but Wednesday's lecture was fine. I didn't make any changes for the Wednesday lecture, so hopefully Monday's mishap was a one-off problem. I'll still put a backup Zoom link on the lectures page in case YouTube doesn't work.

🔬 Labs

In the lab exercise, you learned about sanitizers and how to read and interpret the error messages that they produce. Hopefully this will help you debug any errors that you encounter in future lab exercises and assignments! You also learned how to use the make command. It's important that you know how to use make because we will rarely compile by typing out compilation commands - we'll usually just use make .

In terms of coursework, remember that lab01 and quiz 1 are both due tomorrow 12pm .

Next week, we'll be discussing sorting algorithms, which will give us a good chance to practice our algorithm analysis skills.

See you on Monday!

Lecture livestreams

Posted by Kevin Luxa 🦉 Wednesday 13 September 2023, 12:08:39 PM.

Hey everyone,

The lecture on Monday couldn't be livestreamed to YouTube due to some error which didn't occur during our testing. Sorry to those who were waiting in the YouTube livestream. It appears to be an intermittent issue, because the livestream worked when I tested it in the same theatre about an hour later.

I'm determined to get livestreams working though! We're not quite sure what the issue is yet, but we'll try to figure it out the next few days. Today, I'll put up both the YouTube link and a link to a Zoom meeting as backup in case the YouTube stream doesn't work. The links will be on the Lectures page.

Help Sessions

Posted by Kevin Luxa 🦉 Tuesday 12 September 2023, 11:09:33 AM.

Hi everyone,

This is just a reminder that help sessions start this week!

The first help session is today from 12-1pm. See the schedule for the other times.

They will be held in the newly allocated space called CSE Help (walk into the K17 building and it'll be right there). It's best to bring your own laptop, as there are very few computers there.

This is a great opportunity to get help with revision topics such as pointers and linked lists if you aren't completely comfortable with them yet. You can also get help with this week's lab.

Remember: if you have any confusion or misunderstandings it's best to try to get them resolved as soon as possible - if you are still confused about pointers/linked lists in the middle of term or later, it'll be harder to help, as many topics later in this course use them.

See you there!