Final Project Submission

The final project consists of the complete repository, a concise report, a class presentation, and peer questions.

Complete repository.

The repository should contain the final implementations, tests, experimental scripts, results, checkpoint reports, and presentation materials. Someone outside your team should be able to clone the repository and reproduce the important results by following the instructions in README.md. The final Gradescope assessment will perform a cumulative validation of the required repository structure and algorithm interfaces.

Final report.

Store the report in:

reports/final.pdf

Aim for approximately three pages of text, not counting figures, tables, and references. Do not repeat the checkpoint reports. Instead, synthesize what you learned around four questions:

1. What approaches did you try? Briefly describe the straightforward exact, improved exact, and heuristic approaches.

2. What happened? Present the most important experimental results.

3. Where did the methods work or fail? Discuss solution quality, computational effort, running time, what the bound can certify when OPT is unavailable, and the effect of input structure.

4. What did you learn? State the most important conclusions supported by the evidence.

Your interesting or difficult instance should appear in the final report or presentation.

Class presentation.

Tell the story of the investigation rather than reproducing the report section by section. Address the problem studied, where the straightforward exact approach became impractical, how exact computation was improved, the heuristic strategy or strategies, what the bound could certify when OPT was unavailable, the most interesting result or instance, and what surprised the team. Every team member must present a meaningful portion of the project.

Store the final slides in:

presentation/slides.pdf

Peer questions and discussion.

Each team will be assigned at least one other team’s problem or presentation to examine and will submit three substantive questions: one about an algorithmic decision, one about experimental evidence, and one about whether an idea could transfer between the two problems or why their behavior differs.