Office Hours

Hi class,

I'll be out of town for my office hours tomorrow (Monday). I'll be back Tuesday afternoon, in time for my regularly scheduled office hours on Wednesday. If you want to meet at some other time, feel free to send me an email, and I'll make sure to be available.

-- Aaron

I have several graded midterms. Let me know if you need them this weekend.

Gary Miller

Takehome Midterm and Assignment 4

Hi,

The take home midterm is available on the website and is due Monday before class. The scoring formula is mentioned once again on the first page.

Also, the due date of homework 4 is moved back to Wednesday.

Several people have asked about one complication resulting from question 2.1 on homework 4. The issue is about how to insert vertices in front of other vertices in the ordering and still be able to query whether one vertex comes before another in the ordering. There is a way to get around this issue by processing the entire graph again globally after building partial information. However, you can also use a data structure by Dietz and Sleator that supports both operations in O(1) worst case time. It can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sleator/papers/maintaining-order.pdf if you are interested.

Richard,

Clarification on Hw4 Question 2.1

Several people have asked about whether "$v_i$ is connected to $v_j$, $v_k$" in the definition of deadend free ordering in question 2.1 means path connectivity. It should instead be "$v_i$ has edges to $v_j$, $v_k$". Also, note that there are no other assumptions on where $v_j$ and $v_k$ are in the ordering other than being before/after $v_i$.

Richard,

Homework 4 Question 3.1

There is a major mistake in question 3.1 on homework 4. I neglected to mention that the Pythagorean triples should be modulo n, that is:

$a^2+b^2 \equiv c^2 mod n$

The question should be doable now. Sorry about this.

Richard,

What you can bring to the exam

Hello class,

Here is what you are allowed to bring with you to use for the midterm on Monday:

+ (Annotated) course notes from the website

+ "The Design and Analysis of Algorithms" by Kozen, either in hard copy, or the printed chapters from the website.

Note: You cannot bring any other textbook.

You shouldn't bring other materials. Email us if you have specific questions.

Good luck!

Correction to problem 4.

Hi guys,

Problem 4 on the latest homework turns out to be a lot harder than we anticipated. (Thanks to Jiri and Min for pointing this out).

Here is a modification that makes it much more tractable. The separation penalty between vertices i and j will now depend on the distance between the labels of i and j. That is, label pairs (Bac, Foc) and (Foc, For) still result in penalty p_i,j, but the label pair (Bac,For) now results in penalty 2*p_i,j

Sorry about this. Grading will be lenient, and extra credit if you solve the original problem.