CST 370-30 - Algorithm Design & Analysis Week 6

Week 6:

This week focused on balanced search structures and priority based structures. At first AVL trees were confusing, especially keeping track of balance factors after each insertion. After doing several rotation examples, I started noticing patterns in the cases instead of just memorizing steps. Some insertions only needed a quick fix, while others required adjusting two levels of the tree. It started to make more sense when I followed the height updates step by step from the leaf up to the root. After that, 2 3 trees felt like a shift in thinking because instead of rotating nodes, the structure avoids imbalance by storing more than one key in a node. That contrast helped me see that both methods are trying to keep searches fast, just in their own way. Heaps and heapsort clarified how the heap property supports efficient removal of maximum elements and sorting in place. Finally, hashing introduced constant time access ideas, along with handling collisions and load factor considerations.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CST 338 Software Design - Week 1

  Week 1 Learning Journal: Reflection on HW 01 and Other Assignments: Week 1 we worked on multiple assignments. Since these are all 8-week courses, we have to learn really fast which is a big challenge for me. I'm the type of person to work better as the days go on and the more I get used to something. As soon as I'll grasp everything here we'll already be finishing up with the course. Anyways, I worked on CodingBat exercises, learning UML and JUnit, setting up the LDPM project, etc. I really liked the Project 1 starter and IntelliJ stuff as I got to use the software and get accustomed to it. I am feeling more comfortable everyday as I use it. I can say I feel proud that I can use such a software. One of the challenges with this class is the Git platform. That will take a bit to get used to. “The submission is missing the screenshots of fields and auto generated setters+getters.” I received this comment in the first check in for the big project that’s coming and this was on...
Read more

CST 338 Software Design - Week 4

  Work with some of your fellow classmates and go through your solution to project 1: LDPM With whom did you work? I worked with one of my teammates named Nasser.  What was your strategy for solving the assignments?       -  Did you start writing code right away? Did you plan it out on paper?  I have a very simple way of doing these kinds of assignments. I open the directions and start following the order and do it step by step. Thankfully we have clear enough directions to do that or else I wouldn't be able to as these projects are a little complex. I also don't like games at all so making a game is even harder for me. After looking through directions I just started coding method by method with the directions given until I completed it.       -  What was THEIR strategy for solving the assignments Nasser said he did the same thing.       -  How would you change your strategy having worked on the as...
Read more

CST 334 - Week 3

Week 3 Summary: This week in CST 334 was a rollercoaster. We started working on PA3, which is all about building a memory allocator. Basically our own version of malloc() and free(). At first, I thought, “okay cool, pointers and structs again,” but this assignment humbled me quick. Managing memory manually, keeping track of chunks, splitting them, and then coalescing them back together sounds simple on paper but actually implementing it without causing segmentation faults or crashing everything was tough. One thing that stood out was just how fragile everything becomes when you're directly manipulating memory. A wrong pointer or forgetting to update a linked list will break the whole thing. A lot of my time was spent debugging and going through each line of my code just to figure out where things were going sideways. The split_node function specifically gave me a hard time. It took me a while to realize how important it is to keep the fwd and bwd pointers clean or everything falls ...
Read more