Lecture Notes for CS 512, Algorithm Design

Introduction - 19 January 2000

These are provisional lecture notes, expect changes.

  1. Introduction

    1. What are algorithms?

      1. Like recipies

        1. individual, collected - eggs, dinner; sorting, payroll.

        2. grouped into classes - desserts, main course; graph, spell checking.

    2. Issues

      1. Suitability - is the algorithm apropriate?

      2. Expense - time, space costs.

      3. Correctness - does the algorithm work?

      4. Algorithms vs. programming

    3. How algorithms come to be.

      1. Design - many techniques; induction.

      2. Analysis - paper and pencil analysis.

      3. Implementation - sometimes followed by more analysis (measurement).

    4. Preliminaries.

      1. Notation - pseudo-code; if, then, arrows.

      2. Complexity - big-oh notation.

This page last modified on 31 January 2000.