Topics for the Final Exam

You are allowed to use one page of notes (both sides, 8.5 X 11) with anything you would like to put on it for the test.  You can also use a calculator if you wish.   Aside from those materials, no other books or notes are allowed.  The test is comprehensive, so everything we covered in class is fair game!  This includes your favorites, like recurrence relations and sorting algorithms. However, about 50% of the test will cover the material that came after the second exam.

Here are the topics since the second exam:

• Greedy Algorithms
• What makes an algorithm greedy?
• Greedy choice property
• Greedy algorithms vs. dynamic programming
• Compression
• Huffman encoding
• Run Length encoding
• Arithmetic encoding
• General principles behind LZW compression
• General principles behind JPEG compression
• e.g. lossy, conversion to frequency domain, quantization
• String Algorithms
• Naive
• Finite State Automaton
• Knuth Morris Pratt
• Boyer Moore
• Be able to demonstrate each on a string, advantages, disadvantages
• Parallel Computation
• Different Models;  CR/CW/ER/EW
• Priority CW, Arbitrary CW, Combining CW
• Simple algorithms on some models, e.g. min-finding, broadcast, max-finding
• Problems using the theoretical models in practice
• Specific parallel architectures
• Characteristics:  dimension, degree, bisection width
• Linear Array
• Mesh
• Hypercube
• Torus
• Simple algorithms on each; e.g. min-finding, broadcast
• Genetic Algorithms
• What is a genetic algorithm, what it is good for
• How to design a chromosome/genome for a particular problem
• Describe crossover, mutation operators