COMP9024 Notices

Your feedback

Posted by Michael Thielscher Friday 09 February 2024, 03:39:46 PM.

Dear COMP9024 Student,

As the summer term draws to a close, I want to share with you the feedback that I received from you on myExperience. A clear majority of you suggested that the format we had, with 2x2hours on 2 days per week, was the preferred one. The two main reasons given were: fewer commutes to UNSW and more flexibility to study the course material and problem sets on lecture-free days.

Thank you for responding to this question and also for all your other comments and suggestions. I was glad to see a final participation rate of over 75% in the myExperience survey. And while some of you rightly pointed out that this was a very intense course that required you to go to your limit (and beyond), without exception you all also said that you were satisfied with the teaching, which I was very happy to see.

I wish everyone a successful Term 1,
Michael

Result

Posted by Michael Thielscher Wednesday 07 February 2024, 07:20:34 PM.

Your marks are now available through cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/Student/sturec.php or from your CSE account using

9024 classrun -sturec

The university has a policy to disallow any adjustments to near-misses of higher grades, and they utilise statistical methods to ensure compliance. In a large class like ours, it is inevitable that some of you will have missed a higher grade by just 1 mark. In such cases, I apologise for what is simply bad luck, but please note that all questions were manually marked using the same criteria for everyone, and then we are not allowed to make individual adjustments.

A special thanks to Abhay, Kevin and Ziming for ensuring the finalisation of results just two days after the exam.

Kudos to the following students for scoring 90 or higher:

An Chang
Xiangjun Zai
Chi Cheng
Jie Liu
Mingcong Xie
Haoning Shang
Qian Chen
Xintao Chen

Well done, and congratulations to everyone else who passed and achieved a good result!

Have a good start to term 1.

Michael

Slide 139 (Week 4)

Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 25 January 2024, 05:46:47 PM.

A small note on slide 139 (week 4), which was accidentally missing a second part to clarify that new nodes in red-black trees are always red. This has now been added to the slide and also to the lecture notes (both the html version and the printable Pdf).

Mid-session test in 1 hour

Posted by Michael Thielscher Tuesday 23 January 2024, 10:24:46 AM.

A friendly reminder that the mid-session test will begin in 1 hour. You can find the test on Moodle or access it directly through this link:

Midterm Test - Tuesday 23 January

The test will open at 11:30am and automatically close 1 hour and 5 minutes after you have started it or at 12:40pm the latest (even if you have started after 11:35am).

Time is important, but keep in mind that you have an average of 6 minutes per question.

Best of luck everyone,
Michael

Assignment released

Posted by Michael Thielscher Friday 19 January 2024, 01:46:03 PM.

The large programming assignment has now been released. You can find it on our WebCMS course page (click on Assignment in the menu on the left). The main topic is problem solving with graph data structures and graph search. Since the assignment gives you a lot of freedom to develop your own approach to the problem, readability of your program will be very important. Please make sure to adhere to the principles of structured programming and use good commenting.

The assignment is due on Friday 2 February at 12:00noon.

Before you start coding, pay heed to the following advice from the Tao of Programming (Book 3):

Thus spake the Master Programmer:
"When a program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes."

Have fun,
Michael

Week 2 Problem Set 2: Exercise 5

Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 15 January 2024, 09:38:04 AM.

A clarification on the file memerrors.txt to be submitted for exercise 5: Automarking will take into account that there may be different correct answers for some of the functions, and will be able to understand what you write as long as you use 1 line per function as required. Not all potential errors may necessarily be present.

Welcome to COMP9024: Data Structures and Algorithms

Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 28 December 2023, 03:49:28 PM.

Dear COMP9024 Student,

Welcome to the summer course.

Please note that our course will begin next week on Thursday ( 4 January ) from 11am-1pm in Ainsworth G03 (Building K-J17).

Meanwhile check out the course webpage webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP9024/24T0/ . Have a look at the "Course Overview " to learn more about the contents of the course, the assessments and recommended textbooks.

See you next Thursday,
Michael