Syllabus for CS 141 - FINAL exam

Topics and Sample Questions for FINAL:

Concept of worst-case time-complexity
Asymptotic notations: big-Oh, big-Theta, big-Omega and their properties
- prove or disprove that the following function is big-Oh, big-Theta, big-Omega of ...
Worst-case analysis of (purely) iterative code
Deriving and solving recurrence relations
- derive a recurrence relation from the following pseudo-code ...
- solve the following recurrence relation by iterative substitution ...
- solve the following recurrence relation by Master Theorem ...
- prove by induction the correctness of the solution of the following recurrence relation ...
Divide and Conquer method (Karatsuba's integer multiplication, Strassen's matrix multiplication, closest pair)
- questions (correctness, pseudocode, time complexity) on the algorithms mentioned in parenthesis (or about the corresponding problems)
- devise a divide and conquer algorithm for the following problem ...
Greedy method (activity selection, fractional knapsack, Huffman coding)
- questions (correctness, pseudocode, time complexity) on the algorithms mentioned in parenthesis (or about the corresponding problems)
- build the optimal huffman tree for the following string ...
- devise a greedy algorithm for the following problem ...
- argue why the following algorithm has the greedy-choice property ...
- argue why the following problem has the optimal substructure property ...
- show why greedy is a bad choice for the following problem ...
Dynamic Programming method (counting combinations, 01-knapsack, LCS)
- questions (correctness, pseudocode, time complexity) on the algorithms mentioned in parenthesis (or about the corresponding problems)
- devise a dynamic programming algorithm for the following problem ...
- compute the maximum profit for the following 01-knapsack assignment ...
- compute the longest common subsequence for the following two strings ...
- given the final table for a dynamic programming algorithm, trace back all the optimal solutions...
Unweighted graphs (DFS, BFS, topological sorting)
- questions (correctness, pseudocode, time complexity) on the algorithms mentioned in parenthesis (or about the corresponding problems)
- questions on the data structures used to represents graphs
- given an unweighted graph G devise an efficient algorithm for the following problem ...
- devise an efficient algorithm for the following problem on unweighted undirected graphs ...
- devise an efficient algorithm for the following problem on unweighted directed graphs ...
Weighted graphs (single-source shortest path: Dijkstra and Bellman-Ford, shortest paths on a DAG, all-pairs shortest path: Floyd-Warshall, minimimum spanning tree: Kruskal and Prim)
- questions (correctness, pseudocode, time complexity) on the algorithms mentioned in parenthesis (or about the corresponding problems)
- run Dijkstra algorithm on the following graph ...
- run the shortest-path algorithm on the following DAG ...
- run Kruskal algorithm on the following graph ...
- run Prim algorithm on the following graph ...
- run Bellman-Ford algorithm on the following (small) graph ...
- run Floyd-Warshall algorithm on the following (very small) graph ...
- devise an efficient algorithm for the following problem on weighted undirected graphs ...
- devise an efficient algorithm for the following problem on weighted directed graphs ...

NOTE: The list above is representative of the problems that could be on the exam, but not necessarly exhaustive