CST370 - Week 3 Engagement

 Week 3 Learning Journal:

This week, a new family of design techniques and graph traversals were presented. First, brute force design techniques were reviewed which rely on enumerating and checking each potential solution, like how we discussed brute force solution to both TSP and the Knapsack Problem, also why brute force may be impractical for large problem instances. Next, we also went over Breadth-First Search and Depth-First Search traversals to graphs, and I was surprised to learn where to use each type of traversal and their time complexities for graph representations using either an adjacency list or an adjacency matrix. I enjoyed the discussion of divide and conquer algorithms and the Master Theorem, which showed an organized technique for reasoning about time complexities of recursive functions rather than unrolling each one.

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