Syllabus for CS141 - Midterm 1

Topics and Sample Questions for Midterm 1:
• 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, linear-time selection)
  • 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 ...

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