Getting Started

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

Goal: Form your team and submit your three ranked project preferences.
Points: 5 · Submission: Gradescope

Project Selection comes before Checkpoint 1. Follow the four steps below in order.

1. Form your team

Work in a team of two or three students, and choose a team name. Students who have instructor approval to work individually may submit as a one-person team. You will need the name of every team member for your submission.

Learning Objectives

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

By completing Beyond Brute Force, you should be able to:

explain the relationship between an NP-complete decision problem and its optimization version;
identify what constitutes a feasible solution and explain how a proposed solution can be verified efficiently;
implement and analyze a straightforward exhaustive exact algorithm;
reason about the state of an exact search and whether repeated subproblems are present;
improve exact computation using an appropriate algorithm-design technique while preserving optimality;
construct and justify a valid polynomial-time bound for an optimization problem;
design and evaluate a polynomial-time heuristic for instances where exact computation becomes impractical;
use reproducible randomized experiments and best-so-far behavior to evaluate heuristic approaches;
compare heuristic results with known optima when available and with valid bounds or best-known solutions when OPT is unknown;
perform controlled experiments across a collection of problem instances;
identify input characteristics that affect computational effort or solution quality; and
communicate algorithmic conclusions using appropriately qualified experimental evidence.

Key terminology

The theoretical portion of this project focuses on the decision version of your problem, while the programming and experimental portions focus on the corresponding optimization version.

Start Here on CS 412

Getting Started

1. Form your team

Learning Objectives

Key terminology