Build & Test on CS 412

Quick Reference

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page is the command and workflow reference you are most likely to revisit while developing and evaluating your project. Run all commands from the repository root unless noted otherwise.

Project selection and repository creation

Project Selection (before Checkpoint 1): Follow Getting Started to form your team (or work individually with approval), read the problem definitions, rank three preferences, and submit project.json on Gradescope. There is no repository to create in this stage.

Repository & Gradescope

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Each team uses one shared GitHub repository for the Beyond Brute Force project. The repository is created through Classroom 50 and is used throughout all checkpoints and the final submission.

The repository has an explicit ownership boundary. Course-owned files provide common infrastructure and may be updated during the semester. Student-owned files contain your team’s algorithm implementations and will not be overwritten by a course infrastructure update.

Do not rename required files or directories unless the project instructions explicitly tell you to do so. Gradescope and the supplied project tools depend on this structure.

Program Interface

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

All Beyond Brute Force implementations use the same command-line interface and output structure. This allows the same testing, Gradescope, and experimental tools to work with every project problem.

The repository separates project-maintained infrastructure from team implementation code:

src/course/     course-owned infrastructure
src/student/    student-owned implementations

The common entry point remains:

src/solve.py

You implement the algorithms under src/student/. You are not expected to recreate the command-line parser, problem dispatch, input readers, or JSON-output infrastructure under src/course/.

Testing & Autograders

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The project uses three complementary kinds of checking.

Local public tests

Run the supplied public test programs while developing. They are designed to catch interface, correctness, verifier, bound, and basic scalability problems before submission.

The exact commands and useful options are collected in Quick Reference.

Gradescope

Gradescope uses additional tests that follow the same documented interfaces and input formats. The hidden tests are intended to verify correctness independently rather than reward solutions that are tailored only to the public examples.

Graph Interface

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Several Beyond Brute Force problems use the same course-provided representation for a simple, undirected graph.

The class is defined in:

src/course/common/graph.py

Algorithms that use this representation may import it with:

from course.common.graph import Graph

The course-provided input routines construct the Graph object before calling your algorithm. In most cases, your code will therefore use a Graph rather than read or construct one itself.

This page defines the public interface that student code may rely on.

Input Files

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond Brute Force uses standard input formats shared by multiple project problems.

The course-provided support code reads these files and converts each input into the representation passed to your algorithm.

You need to understand the formats well enough to inspect supplied instances and create your own test cases, but you are not expected to write the low-level parsing code yourself.

Each invocation of src/solve.py processes one problem instance.

Instance Names

Unless an explicit identifier is supplied on the command line, an instance is identified by the name of its input file without the filename extension.