Welcome to CPSC 320!
Our overall course goal is to learn about a common and important set of problem types, algorithmic solution approaches, and analysis techniques, and to gain the tools and experience necessary to judge how a new problem might fit one of these categories, how to approach solving the problem, and how to analyze and adjust your solution.
A few administrative notes for today, much longer than our usual since it’s the start of the term:
- Sign up for our Piazza discussion board at https://piazza.com/ubc.ca/winterterm22017/cpsc320/ and read the welcome post there that has other important material! You’ll need the Piazza access code, which we’ll announce each day in lecture for the first week or so.
- Get your @ugrad.cs.ubc.ca account set up. See https://www.cs.ubc.ca/getacct/.
- Come to your registered tutorial this week (3-5 Jan) for some review problems to help get you ready for CPSC 320. Next week (10-12 Jan) there will be a graded quiz focused on stable marriage and algorithm/data structures design and analysis review in tutorial!
- Do the pre-class reading for 2018/01/05, which is Kleinberg and Tardos Section 1.1. (Do get the textbook ASAP or be prepared to thoroughly study other resources on your own! Previous terms’ students have suggested that the international edition is equivalent but cheaper, although we cannot guarantee that’s true!)
- Review CPSC 221/EECE 320, especially asymptotic analysis and very high-level data structure info (binary trees, self-balancing binary trees, heaps, hash tables, etc.).
Next, here are today’s handouts:
- Slides used to introduce the course.
- Stable Marriage Problem Worksheet (sample solution to be posted later)
- How to Solve a 320 Problem
- Gale-Shapley Algorithm
- Canadian Resident Matching Service’s Match Algorithm page
- “NRMP As a Labor Market” article about the genesis of the National Resident Matching Program
Finally, if you wish to read ahead, we expect to read at least these sections in this order (changes may happen but probably not drastic ones):
- The rest of Chapter 1 (and, for every chapter we read, the chapter intro)
- Chapter 2 (largely review), with emphasis on 2.3
- Chapter 3
- Sections 4.1-4.7 of Chapter 4 (a bit of which is likely review)
- Sections 5.1-5.4 of Chapter 5, plus the Master Theorem on Wikipedia
- Sections 6.1-6.6 and 6.8 (which is likely review) of Chapter 6
- Sections 8.1-8.5, maybe 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, and 8.10 of Chapter 8. Note that 8.10 is useful to read early and reread as you work through this chapter.