4005-800: Midterm

The midterm will take place on Wednesday, January 25th, during class time (4:00-5:50am for section 01 and 6:00-7:50pm for section 70).

More info:

• The midterm will cover material from the first 5 weeks. The specific topics are:
  • Asymptotic notation
  • Recurrences and divide-and-conquer algorithms (MergeSort)
  • Other sorts and searching (HeapSort, RadixSort, Select)
  • Greedy algorithms (divisible Knapsack, two variants of the Interval Scheduling problem, Huffman)
  • Dynamic programming (Knapsack, Longest Increasing Subsequence, Weighted Interval Scheduling, Longest Common Subsequence, Chain Matrix Multiplication)
  There will be roughly one problem from each of these topics. I could also ask questions related to the three geometric algorithms (point inside a polygon, area of a polygon, convex hull) but I will not devote an entire to question to them. There will definitely be a problem on asymptotic notation and another problem on dynamic programming.


• The midterm consists of 5 problems, each worth 10 points. I will drop the lowest-scored problem and the remaining four problems contribute to the overall score.


• The midterm is closed book, notes, laptops, cell-phones, etc. However, you might bring one letter-sized "cheat-sheet" in your own handwriting (no printouts or photocopies).


• Here is an old midterm for you to practice on. The practice midterm does not indicate the difficulty of the actual midterm (actually, it is a little on the easy side, the real midterm will be probably somewhat more difficult - but not too much). Here are the solutions of the practice midterm. I recommend you to solve the practice midterm first and only after you are done, check the solutions.