Readings

Readings refer to chapters and/or sections of the course textbook:

Buy at MIT Press Buy at Amazon Cormen, Thomas, Charles Leiserson, Ronald Rivest, and Clifford Stein. Introduction to Algorithms. 3rd ed. MIT Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780262033848.

LEC # TOPICS READINGS
Unit 1: Introduction
1 Algorithmic thinking, peak finding 1, 3, D.1
2 Models of computation, Python cost model, document distance 1, 3, Python Cost Model
Unit 2: Sorting and Trees
3 Insertion sort, merge sort 1.2, 2.1–2.3, 4.3–4.6
4 Heaps and heap sort 6.1–6.4
5 Binary search trees, BST sort 10.4, 12.1–12.3, Binary Search Trees
6 AVL trees, AVL sort 13.2, 14
7 Counting sort, radix sort, lower bounds for sorting and searching 8.1–8.3
Unit 3: Hashing
8 Hashing with chaining 11.1–11.3
9 Table doubling, Karp-Rabin 17
10 Open addressing, cryptographic hashing 11.4
  Quiz 1  
Unit 4: Numerics
11 Integer arithmetic, Karatsuba multiplication  
12 Square roots, Newton's method  
Unit 5: Graphs
13 Breadth-first search (BFS) 22.1–22.2, B.4
14 Depth-first search (DFS), topological sorting 22.3–22.4
Unit 6: Shortest Paths
15 Single-source shortest paths problem 24.0, 24.5
16 Dijkstra 24.3
17 Bellman-Ford 24.1–24.2
18 Speeding up Dijkstra  
  Quiz 2  
Unit 7: Dynamic Programming
19 Memoization, subproblems, guessing, bottom-up; Fibonacci, shortest paths 15.1, 15.3
20 Parent pointers; text justification, perfect-information blackjack 15.3, Problem 15–4, Blackjack rules
21 String subproblems, psuedopolynomial time; parenthesization, edit distance, knapsack 15.1, 15.2, 15.4
22 Two kinds of guessing; piano/guitar fingering, Tetris training, Super Mario Bros.  
Unit 8: Advanced Topics
23 Computational complexity 34.1–34.3
24 Algorithms research topics