Data Structures and Algorithms COMP2521 25T1

Welcome to Week 3

Posted by Kevin Luxa 🦉 2 days ago, last modified 2 days ago.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to week 3!

This week we'll be introducing abstract data types, a very important concept which we'll explore many examples of in the rest of the course. We'll also take a look at our first new data structure - a binary search tree!

Updates

🦆 Help Sessions

The help session schedule has now been updated with help sessions for the rest of the term - if you are looking for help with lab exercises or (in the future) assignments, please attend a help session! You can also ask questions about course content, but remember that there are consultations after each lecture where you can ask about lecture content specifically.

🔬 Lab Marks

We have now run the automarking for lab01, so most of you should be able to see your mark for the automarking component on your View Submissions/Marking page . If you have gotten your lab01 work handmarked, then you should also be able to see your mark for the handmarking component. (If you haven't gotten lab01 handmarked yet, remember that this is the last week to do so!)

The marks and late penalties for labs are shown in the table at the top of the View Submissions/Marking page. For example:

The fields ending in _auto are the automarking marks, the fields ending in _subj are the handmarking marks, and the fields ending in _latepen are the late penalties for the labs. Note that we calculate the late penalties two weeks after the deadline, after submissions have completely closed.

If you want to see the automarking details for a particular lab, you can click on the blue "View Marking" buttons in the table at the bottom of the page.

🧮 Sorting Algorithms

Last week, we learned about many sorting algorithms and analysed their time complexities and properties.

In week 3, you will put your knowledge of sorting algorithms to use in an interesting lab exercise ! There is no coding in this lab exercise - rather, you will be measuring the performance behaviour and characteristics of some mystery sorting algorithms and deducing what they are. You will also be allowed to work in pairs for this lab - I highly encourage you to find someone from your lab to work with so that you get to know more of your peers :)

H11B tutorial moved to K-E12-105 (BUS 105)

Posted by Kevin Luxa 🦉 8 days ago, last modified 8 days ago.

Hi everyone,

If you are in H11B (Thursday 11am, Tay and Benedict's class), please note that your tutorial has been moved from Library 176A to K-E12-105 (BUS 105).

Welcome to Week 2

Posted by Kevin Luxa 🦉 9 days ago.

Hey everyone,

I hope you enjoyed your first week of term! Here's a recap of what we learned in week 1:

🥞 Recursion

Don't think of recursion as simply a function calling itself - recursion is really a technique where we solve problems by solving subproblems, i.e., smaller versions of the same problem. 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 this week. Try to get comfortable with it, because we'll be using it in future topics. If you think you need more help understanding recursion, feel free to come to a help session or consultation :)

📈 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.

Also, I just want to mention that in this course, you don't need to know the formal definition of big-O, but it's given in the lectures so you're aware of where it comes from. In this course, it's sufficient to understand how to remove lower-order terms and constant factors, which will give you the time complexity of an algorithm in terms of big-O.

🔬 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 .

Remember that labs and quizzes are due Monday 5pm the following week, so the week 1 lab and quiz 1 are both due 5pm today. After you have submitted your week 1 lab, you need to get it hand-marked by week 3.

This week, we'll be discussing sorting algorithms, which will give us a good chance to practice our algorithm analysis skills. See you tomorrow!