Interesting the you mention that some courses will only sometimes be challenging. When I did Algorithms and Data Structures, the assignment was all about applying them to get the fastest execution time on quiet complex set of data that had an inner loop inside each data point to optimise.
Completing it the worse way possible, ie setting up arrays and traversing them linearly would give you an execution time in the hours. It really took experimenting with different versions of most of the structures and algorithms taught to get the best execution result.
This years assignment that my brother is doing, seems that to get the fastest execution given the stuff taught in the class it's just a matter of using one hash table and a couple of numerically indexed lookup arrays. So the people doing it this year will get nowhere near as much out the assignment.
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Interesting the you mention that some courses will only sometimes be challenging. When I did Algorithms and Data Structures, the assignment was all about applying them to get the fastest execution time on quiet complex set of data that had an inner loop inside each data point to optimise.
Completing it the worse way possible, ie setting up arrays and traversing them linearly would give you an execution time in the hours. It really took experimenting with different versions of most of the structures and algorithms taught to get the best execution result.
This years assignment that my brother is doing, seems that to get the fastest execution given the stuff taught in the class it's just a matter of using one hash table and a couple of numerically indexed lookup arrays. So the people doing it this year will get nowhere near as much out the assignment.