CST370 - Week 5 Reflection

 Week 5 Learning Recap

        On the other side of our first midterm exam, I'm now attempting to absorb the material at a more demonstrable level. I was mindful of ensuring practical understanding before continuing my traversal of the week's offerings of Quick Sort, binary trees, Decrease & Conquer, Insertion Sort, Topological Sort, and Transform & Conquer--among other puzzles and detours. A sizeable gap in my exam performance revolved around analyzing time complexities for new algorithms and programs I hadn't encountered yet. This week's module offered moments to rectify that trouble right away by analyzing time costs calculations with the Quick Sort worst-case and best-case T(n) equations. 

        Following along to Professor Jia's explanation of Quick Sort and writing out the recursion tree by hand helped clarify why the linear work per level accumulates logarithmically--in the most favorable case at least. Binary Tree traversal orders were straightforward enough, mimicking the various orderings within subtrees was strangely satisfying and intuitive. Working through topological sorting and Kahn's algorithm felt like classic CST370, always learning how to hack our way through vertices and edges! I always appreciate a clear path to victory such as calculating in-degrees does. Pre-Sorting and Decrease & Conquer didn't go as in depth in their application but I was intentional with being mindful of how these tools dictate linear, logarithmic, and exponential time complexity behaviors. 

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