Announcements

Announcements will be made here and on the CS170 newsgroup.

People

Lecturer: Professor James Demmel - demmel@cs

Office: 737 Soda, 643-5386
Lectures: TuTh 12:30-2:00 (50 Birge)
Office hours: W 10:00 - 11:00, Th 2:15 - 3:15, or by appointment

TAs:

Discussion Sections

Enrollment: There should be no limit on enrollment, as long as you try to enroll in a section that is not full (and have fulfilled the prerequisites, see below).

Homeworks

The (roughly weekly) homework sets (and solutions) will be posted here as the term progresses.

In general, problem sets will be assigned on Tuesday and will be due Thursday the following week at 4pm in the boxes in 283 Soda Hall. Make sure to put your name, SID, course name (CS170) and section number on each page.

You are encouraged to work on homework problems in study groups of 2 to 4 people. But you must write up your own solutions, and not read or copy the solutions of other students. You may use books or on-line resources to help solve homework problems, but you must credit all such sources in your writeup and you must not copy material verbatim. See also the discussion of grading and academic honesty below.

No late homework will be accepted, since the answers will be posted on the web immediately afterwards. Instead, the lowest 3 homework scores will be dropped.

Exams

Notes and Text

It was developed from a set of notes especially for this course, and we will follow it fairly closely. The previous text book was Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest, which is still a good reference.

Prerequisites: The prerequisites for this course are CS 61B, and either CS 70 or Math 55. In particular you should be comfortable with mathematical induction, big-O notation, and basic data structures. If you need to refresh any of this material, refer to the relevant sections of the textbook. We assume that you are familiar with a standard imperative programming language like C, C++ or Java, so that you can read and write the algorithms presented in the course.

Before this textbook became available, I posted very detailed lecture notes for each lecture on this web page. The availability of this textbook means the notes will mostly point to the sections of the book covered, but I will continue to post more detailed notes of material not in the book.

Syllabus and Lecture Notes

• (1/16) Lecture 1: Course Overview, and Computing Fibonacci Numbers (Chap 0 in text)
• (1/18) Lecture 2: Review of (Modular) arithmetic, Euclid's GCD Algorithm (Sections 1 through 1.2.4 in text)
• (1/23) Lecture 3: Modular division, Primality testing and generation, begin Cryptography/RSA (Sections 1.2.5 to 1.4 in text)
• (1/25) Lecture 4: Finish Cryptography; Hashing (Sections 1.4 and 1.5 in text)
• (1/30) Lecture 5: Divide-and-conquer: Multiplication, Master Theorem, Mergesort (sections 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 in text)
• (2/1) Lecture 6: Divide-and-conquer: Median finding, quicksort, parallelism (section 2.4 in text and extra notes on parallelism)
• (2/6) Lecture 7: Matrix Multiplication (section 2.5 in text and extra notes on cache blocking)
• (2/8) Lecture 8: Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) (section 2.6 in text and extra notes) (last updated 2/8 at 11:15am)
  Here is the Matlab script to create the compressed clown images in the notes.

Handouts

Grades

• Homeworks - 25%
• Quizzes - 5%
• 2 Midterms - 20% each
• Final - 30%

The final exam is schedule for May 16, 5-8pm. A makeup final will only be given for

1. unexpected circumstances beyond your control, documented by a signed note from a physician or equivalent,
2. a religious holiday, or
3. conflict with another scheduled exam (ask the other professor first, and try to avoid this!!).

You are required to a bring a student photo ID and blue-covered exam book to the exams.

There will be a short quiz at the beginning of (most) sections. The quiz will consist of a few simple questions related to the material from the previous class. There will be no make-up quizzes but the two lowest quiz scores will be dropped. The motivation is to encourage you to keep up with lectures.

Regrading of homework, quizzes or exams will be done when there has been a mistake, in order to make sure all students are graded consistently. To ask for a regrade, you must return the work to your TA within one week of getting it back, along with a written note (on another piece of paper) explaining the problem. The entire assignment may be regraded in this case.