Congrats!

Congratulations on having completed CS157! We hope you learned a lot from the course. Good luck on any remaining finals you may have!

End of Term Logistics

Please note the following logistics for CS157 for the rest of the term.

The location of the lecture videos has changed, so the link on the website was broken for some time. It has now been updated.
You must submit PS4 in class, as with PS3. HW5, however, will be submitted electronically.
HW5's due date has been extended to Thursday, April 26, giving you 9 days instead of 7.
Oral exam 2 will be held throughout the week of April 23, not just Wednesday-Friday.
The final will be held in class on Tuesday, May 1 (as expected). For the take home portion, you will have 72 hours instead of 24 hours - it will be due in the CS53 handin bin on Friday, May 4 at 11:50AM.

More formal details about the remaining exams will be forthcoming.

Midterm

Remember that the midterm will take place in class on Thursday at the usual time. You will then have a further 24 hours at home to answer the same questions. The at-home answers should be handed in to the CS053 handin bin.

Schedule Change

We have decided to cancel HW4. The Assignments page has been updated to denote this change.

Lab Assignments

If you haven't received an e-mail about your lab, please contact the HTA immediately!

Labs are the weeks of Feburary 5, February 19, March 4, and April 8.

Mailing List Archives

Archives for messages sent to the student list are available here. Note that you will need to log in with your CS email address and LDAP password. If you don't know your LDAP password, you can reset it by

logging in to a department Linux system
running the "kinit" command and authenticating with your Kerberos (login) password
running "/local/bin/ldappasswd" to set a new LDAP password.

Course Description

A single algorithmic improvement can have a greater impact on our ability to solve a problem than ten years of incremental improvements in CPU speed. In CS157, we study techniques for designing and analyzing algorithms.

FAQs

What is CS157 all about? We study algorithms and data structures for a wide variety of problems in Computer Science.

Why study algorithms? The goal is to build a deep(er) understanding of fundamental algorithmic paradigms such as Divide and Conquer, Dynamic Programming, Greedy Approaches, and Approximation.

How are we going to do that? We emphasize rigor in our proofs of correctness and runtime.

Are there any prerequisites? The prerequisites are: ((CS16 or CS18 or CS19) and CS22) (or equivalent). This is targeted to approximately junior undergraduates who have enjoyed basic data structures and algorithms and want to go beyond that, in particular the problem solving and rigorous analysis perspective.

Meeting Time

Lectures will be held every Tuesday and Thursday, from 10:30 to 11:50 AM, in S. Frank Hall for Life Science MARC.

Course Textbook

You have two choices for course textbook. It is recommended that you get at least one of them. Note that the first one is available free of charge from Umesh Vazirani's web page.

The first is Algorithms by Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani, McGraw Hill 2008, ISBN 978-0-07-352340-8. This book is more concise, but doesn't go into as much detail as the other book.

The second is Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein, MIT Press 2009, ISBN 978-0-262-03384-8. This book is much more detailed than the other, but is substantially more ponderous.

Copies of the former have been ordered at the Brown bookstore. (Alternatively, students may try the following website, created by a Brown student, that supposedly makes it easy to search Amazon, Half.com, and Abebooks.com to find the lowest prices for textbooks.)