CST370: ALGO Week Dos

 Interesting week in learning about time complexity.  I remember learning Big O notation in the past but wasn't aware of Theta and Omega notation as well!  I hadn’t realized before that Big O only tells you the upper bound of an algorithm’s growth rate, while Theta is for tight bounds, and Omega gives you the lower bound.  I remember my professor was mostly concern about the worst case scenario. It was a bit challenging to figure out the notation and remember what the math notations mean again.  

 

Recursion is a difficult topic to understand and grasp and is something I still struggle with. The idea of a function calling itself makes sense in theory, but when it comes to actually tracing through code, especially with multiple recursive calls.  I start to lose track of what’s going on.  I tried to do many practice code online using codingbat, which helped but it still hasn't stuck with me.  

 

Overall, this week was both challenging and rewarding. It felt good to revisit topics I’ve seen before (like Big O), but also a little humbling to realize how much more depth there is, and how some concepts (like recursion) still require a lot of practice and patience. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CST 363 Wk7:

 I 100% prefer MongoDB, it's very intuitive compared to SQL statements, since it's more modern.   Some similarities are the CRUD operations, which makes going from SQL to MongoDB easy to handle. I do like how flexible the data is stored in MongoDB rather than SQL.
Read more

Week 4 Learning Journal

 Part One: Set Your Educational Goals I'd like to focus on developing an excellent portfolio of projects to show case my programming and creative problem solving skills.  How that goal is judged will depend if I can change my career from mechanical engineering to programming! Part Two: Set Your Career Goals I'd like to have a software oriented role, which can be in a variety of fields, but my main goals would be in flight/physics simulation modeling and/or thermal simulation modeling.  Either developing the models themselves or the software that engineers use to solve these types of issues. Part Three: In 18 months, I think I'd do really well, maybe in 70-80% percentile.  I'm genuinely interested in learning computer science topics so it will be a fun journey forward.  Part Four:  I finally caught up on all my coursework after falling behind in the first couple weeks, so I'm glad to have learned more content this week.  This week after working on my ou...
Read more

wk2: Trust the Process

 In the year 2012, Kobe Bryant was having a season filled with injuries and ups and downs, but confidently he said to "Trust the process" in order to achieve his goal of another NBA championship.  While he wasn't able to get this sixth championship, his saying still lives on.  Though I'm sure Kobe wasn't aware that trusting the process lies within our computers that allows them to perform whatever we tell them.   I've learned the interesting bits about how the OS manages processes through the fork() and exec() commands, which appear simple but allow the OS to perform multiple processes.  I later learned about how the OS manages permissions between the user and kernel, so the user can temporarily access higher permissions through the use of traps. Also fun to think about the potential of traps if one were to gain access, they can run malicious code.
Read more