Journal 37

 February 18 - February 24

I cannot believe this class has already come to a close! This course went by so quickly, and was filled with so much information. To be honest, I was pretty scared coming into this course as I had heard from a few computer science friends that this was the hardest course they'd ever taken. I am pleasantly surprised to announce that not only was this course manageable, it was actually very enjoyable. This was likely because my previous Advanced Data Structures course set me up for success, but I will also attribute the course structure and lecture videos. The course was very straight-forward in what was expected and gave us all of the tools to get there. The homework assignments went over what was learned and gave us hands-on practice without feeling like extra, unnecessary work.

This week, we covered a few different non-comparison sorting methods and dynamic programming techniques. We learned about counting sort and why the algorithm is stable when the value range is small (O(n+k) time). We also covered radix sort using counting sort on each digit from LSD to MSD. For dynamic programming, we reviewed Fibonacci and applied DP to the coin-collecting and coin-row problems. We also learned about Floyd's algorithm for all-pairs shortest paths, and greedy methods such as Prim's MST.