CSC 270: Fundamental Data Structures and Techniques

University of Toronto, Fall 2002, evening section

Most information is on the joint course web page.

Office hours at the end of the term:

Since I don't really know when people want to come by, I'm just scheduling "drop-in times". I will be in my office in BA 4234 most of the time between 2:00-6:00 on each of Friday December 13, Monday December 16, and Tuesday December 17. You can send e-mail to confirm a particular time within those time ranges. If you just drop by, I might not be in at any given moment, but I probably will be.

Or I can be available by appointment, but please schedule this in advance.

Of course I'm still highly available by e-mail.

Day-by-day lecture contents

Midterm solutions

midterm solutions

midterm grades statistics

Midterm information

Midterm is October 29th, at 7:10 PM, for about an hour.

Surname A-La: BA 1180
Surname Le-Z: BA 1190 (regular lecture room)
You will not be permitted to write in the wrong room.
Student photo id card required.
One 8½x11" aid sheet permitted. No calculators.

My last year's midterm with solutions is available in postscript or PDF

No tutorial on October 29th. Adrian Lo will be in BA 1190 from 6:10-7:00.

I am out of the country from Friday October 25th through Saturday November 2nd. I will try to check my e-mail every couple of days but I can't promise because I might not be able to find network access.

No lecturer office hours on October 29th, since I'm out of the country. There are a number of TA office hours leading up to the midterm (some geared towards the evening section, some geared towards the day section).

Midterm coverage

Hint: While reading the notes on polynomial evaluation won't directly answer midterm questions, it will be helpful preparation, arguably slightly indirectly.

C
Numerical stuff
- data representation: binary, sign-and-magnitude, IEEE 754 (you won't have to do a detailed IEEE 754 conversion)
- polynomial evaluation
- don't compare floating-point numbers for exact equality (and what you do instead)
- truncation error, round-off error, absolute versus relative error
- root-finding (bisection method, secant method, Newton's method)
- quadrature (basic concepts)
- didn't do order of convergence stuff
Graph theory
- Most notes in graph.html
- basic definitions
- graph colouring
- graph representation (adjacency matrix / adjacency list)
- traversal (BFS/DFS), path-finding
- Dijkstra's algorithm, Floyd-Warshall(-Ingerman) algorithm
- didn't do stuff after section 8.3 (but it may be of interest in your future life!)
assignments one and two

Obviously, a very small fraction of this will actually be tested on the midterm. But I think that the selection actually tested is fair, and shouldn't be too surprising if you are up on most of the course material (unless you're surprised that the test is too easy; we'll have to see how common a complaint that is; I still find that hard to predict).