Performance and Test, Fall 2006

Breaking News

January 3: The schedule for the oral exams is now available. Room information follows later. Please make sure you are there on time, although you should also be prepared that minor delays can occur during the day. If you think you should appear on the list and don't find yourself there, please get in touch with Henrik Reif Andersen ASAP.
December 11: Curriculum is now available on the Resources page
October 22: The reading list for October 25 lecture has been published.
October 7: The reading list for October 11 lecture has been published.
October 6: Exercise class scheduled for Wednesday, Oct 11 is cancelled. The lecture in the morning takes placed as planned
October 4:The project starts today. Read about in on the Resources page
October 4:An interactive demo of Quicksort on the web (Thanks to Stewart).
September 30: Notes from the lecture on sorting are available.
September 30: The next Morning Quiz in performance will take place on Oct 11. The topic is hashing & sorting.
September 20: The exercises for Friday are now ready here on Episode 4.
September 20: Slides from todays lecture are available. We started forming the groups for the project. We formed 4 groups and a 5th partial group (missing one or two members). Everybody needs to join up into groups of 3-4 persons. Here is the current list. Feel free to contact people not in a group yet to arrange the remaining groups. Inform Henrik (hra at itu.dk) about new groups.
September 14: We have missed some important parts of last lecture. For this reason on Friday we will continue with the examples of search and discuss Merge-Sort (RS 8.1, 8.3). The long reading list on sorting is thus postponed until Friday, Sep 29.
September 5: A short note on setting up Eclipse and more for the lab exercises is available from the Resources page
September 4: Rules for handing in written assignments have been updated below.
September 1: Slides from todays lecture, and notes from Wednesday's lecture are available now. Notes for the upcoming math-primer have been published, too.
August 30: The "math primer" lecture takes place on Wednesday, Sep 6. Please come if you feel that your math is rusty. Exercises on Wednesday, Sep 6 are, as planned, for everybody (not on math, but on Union-Find
August 30: Slides from the first lecture are now available under the lecture description for episode 1. They will be made available every time after the lectures.
August 9: This magnificent website has been established.

Time and Place

Lectures: Wednesday and Friday 10:00-12:00, Room 2A14 (mostly)

Tutorials: Wednesday and Friday 13:00-15:00, Room 2A14 (mostly)

The lectures and exercises use 8 hours of your time a week (for most of the week). You are expected to use 20 hours a week on average on this course.

Teachers

Lecturers	Office
Henrik Reif Andersen (hra at itu.dk)	3C03
Andrzej Wąsowski (wasowski at itu.dk)	3C08
Instructors and Project Advisors
Peter Tiedemann (petert at itu.dk)	3C14
Milan Ruzic (milan at itu.dk)	3C10
Sathia Moorthy Subbarayan (sathi at itu.dk)	3C12

You are welcome with any problems, concerns, questions etc. regarding the contents, organization, style etc. of the course including exercises and the project. Contact the teachers any time you can catch them.

We are glad to acknowledge that the following persons contributed to the course design: Anna Pagh, Rasmus Pagh and Yvonne Dittrich. We also build a lot on previous experience of teaching algorithms at ITU, particularly on the old Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures course.

Textbook

[RS] Robert Sedgewick. Algorithms in Java (Parts 1-5). 3rd edition Addison Wesley Professional 2004. ISBN: 0201775786. Available in IT-bogladen in the atrium.

[MS] John D. McGregor. David A. Sykes. A Practical Guide to Testing Object-Oriented Software. 1st Edition. Addison Wesley Professional 2001. ISBN: 0201325640. Available in IT-bogladen.

Programming Project

A group programming project will start approximately in week 5. The project report is the main deliverable of the course.

Assignments

We will post tasks for written assignments along the lectures. These assignments are independent of the main programming project. An instructor will correct your assignments and give you feedback. The assignments are non-mandatory, but it is very hard to succesfully finish the course without working on them. You get feedback on your progress as a service from ITU. You decide yourself whether you use it or not.

The deadline for handing in assignments will be posted each time on the website, but the general rule (that holds most of the time) is that the hand-ins are due on Monday 4pm on the week following the exercises on the topic. The deadlines are strict and there is no exceptions.

We encourage groups of two persons working together on a hand-in. Three is also possible, but less optimal. Single persons need to get a permission from Sathi to hand in alone. Please talk to Sathi during exercises. The groups need not be the same groups as for the main project (in fact we encourage forming different groups for the purpose of exercises).

The hand-ins should be placed in the course pigeon hole, in front of the study administration, before the deadline. We only accept hard copies (manuscripts are encouraged, printouts are allowed). No electronic hand in procedure is planned.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
L. Carroll

Newsgroup

Please post questions and comments to the SPT newsgroup (it-c.courses.SPT) so that others may answer your questions and/or share your insights. Feel free to answer each other's questions and comment on messages. The newsgroup is our discussion forum. Sending and receiving news messages is very similar to sending and receiving e-mails. You can use mozilla, the standard mail&news client at ITU, to read the newsgroups. Ask SysAdm if you need help setting up your software for reading news. There is also this information about newsgroups, available from SysAdm.