cst370 week5

     This week, we covered the quicksort algorithm along with the median of three selection technique that helps improve efficiency and reduce the likelihood of worst case scenarios. We also reviewed binary tree concepts such as height and traversals. While binary tree traversals were a review for me, it was still nice to revisit them and reinforce that knowledge.

    We then moved on to binary search and the decrease and conquer strategy, focusing on how breaking problems down in smaller pieces can lead to increased efficiency. One of the most interesting topics this week was directed acyclic graphs and their sorting method. The process of removing source nodes and repeatedly identifying new source nodes felt very intuitive and made the idea of topological sorting easy to understand. 

    Finally, we discussed the usefulness of presorting and how it can greatly improve algorithm complexity by allowing more efficient approaches like iterative searches instead of relying on n² comparisons.

    The homework was a a nice challenge to translate the pseudo code into a functioning program. Ultimately it made for a great opportunity to reenforcing how efficiency changes between different types of algorithms when presented with best case, worst case, and random inputs.

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