COS 226 Final Information, Spring 2012
This document is intended to help you use your study time effectively. Please
view it as a guide, not a contract.
You may also view the exam archive to study old questions.
Final Exam Schedule
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Office Hours:
- Tuesday, May 15th, 1–3 PM. Steven, CS 003
- Wednesday, May 16th, 4–5 PM. Kevin, CS 207
- Thursday, May 17th, 11:30 AM–12:30 PM. Kevin, CS 207
- Thursday, May 17th, 1–3 PM. Joey, CS 215
- Thursday, May 17th, 3–5 PM. Dave, CS 318c
- Friday, May 18th, 10 AM–12 PM. Diego, CS 003
- Friday, May 18th, 12–2 PM. Jacopo, CS 004
- Friday, May 18th, 2–4 PM. Josh, CS 312
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There will be a review session 4–6pm on Friday, May 18th in CS 104.
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The final exam is 1-4pm on Sunday, May 20th in Friend 101 and Friend 006.
If you are in P01 or P01A (Dave or Diego's precept), you will take the exam in room Friend 006. If you are in any other precept (P01B, P02, P03, P04, or P04A), you will take the exam in Friend 101.
Exam Format
- Closed book, closed note.
- You may bring one 8.5-by-11 sheet (both sides) with notes in your own
handwriting to the exam.
- No electronic devices (e.g., calculators, laptops, and cell phones).
Material Covered
We have covered an enormous amount of
material this semester, but the exam can only contain basic questions about a
small fraction of it. When you study, you should focus on understanding basic
issues, not memorizing details. For each algorithm, you should make sure that
you understand how it works on typical input and then ask yourself some
basic questions: Why do we care about this algorithm? How is it different from
other algorithms for the same problem? When is it effective?
The exam is will stress material covered since the midterm,
including the following components.
- Lectures 13–24.
- Algorithms in Java, 4th edition, Chapters 4–6.
- Exercises 13–23.
- Programming assignments 6–8.
The midterm itself is fair game (did you take the time to understand
questions that you missed on that exam?).
Also, some material before the midterm is also relevant to
putting new algorithms in context. For example, you
might see a question on sorting/searching that covers both
standard and string algorithms.
Partial list of topics covered since the midterm
| key-indexed counting
| LSD string sort
| MSD string sort
| 3-way string quicksort
|
| Depth-first search
| Breadth-first search
| Topological sort
| Prim's algorithm
|
| Kruskal's algorithm
| Dijkstra's algorithm
| Bellman-Ford algorithm
| Ford-Fulkerson algorithm
|
| Knuth-Morris-Pratt substring search
| Boyer-Moore substring search
| Rabin-Karp substring search
|
| RE to NFA
| R-way tries
| Ternary search tries
| Reductions
|
| Run-length coding
| Huffman coding
| LZW compression
| Burrows-Wheeler
|
Questions that show awareness of advanced topics that were covered in lecture
are also fair game (for example, NP-completeness and 3-satisfiability).