With this week wrapping up, I have completed the first week of the Design and Analysis of Algorithms class. There was quite a bit of reading, and the information is somewhat dense, but I've been managing so far. Alongside our readings, we usually have some puzzles, which I honestly enjoy. They can be fun and sometimes confusing, but overall, I find them good. The programming homework has been fairly relaxed, which is nice given the reading load, though the quiz was quite tough. This week's programming assignment was a simple program to determine whether a user's input is a palindrome, and I wrote my program in Java.
In terms of the material, we have had a basic introduction to algorithms, covering topics like Euclid's algorithm for calculating the GCD and other methods for finding the GCD. I learned a bit about reading pseudocode in the context of algorithms, which initially seemed confusing but became clearer as I learned more. We briefly covered sorting and searching algorithms, then moved on to graphs, including unweighted and weighted graphs, and learned about adjacency matrices and lists, along with lots of related terminology. The graph section wasn't difficult to understand, but there is a lot of terminology I still need to refer back to. The most challenging part for me was algorithm analysis, specifically determining time complexities and identifying basic operations. For some reason, this took me longer to grasp, and I still don't have a complete understanding yet.
It's been a challenging first week, and I'm still working on fully grasping some of the terminology and concepts, but overall, I'm enjoying the course so far.
