Exam 1 FAQ

I can't say too much about Exam 1 because my hints may be jumping ahead of how you're thinking about the problem. This page mostly covers clarifications.

• Clarifications on problem 2.

  You may want to think about the final answer/output to the problem as truncated itineraries. For the given example, the schedule for student 1 ends on day 3, and the schedule for student 2 ends on day 2. So, a student will not necessarily visit all the rooms for his final schedule. (Similarly, men had a complete preference list of women, but they didn't necessarily propose to all the women.)

  The original itineraries for the students (the input to the problem) have the students visiting each room during the m days.

  Typo: In the example I give in problem 2, the solution to that problem is on the back... Instead of it saying "coffee shop", it should say "room". The resources on Sakai have been updated to reflect those changes.

• Clarifications on problem 4.

  We're assuming that the distance between nodes with a directed edge is 1. Maybe that's 30 minutes of travel or some similar metric.

• General reminders
  • You may use my lecture notes/slides, your notes, your journals, the textbook, the solutions on Sakai. You may not talk to anyone else nor can you use the Internet.
  • Analyze the correctness and runtime of each algorithm you create. That's the rules of algorithm design and analysis--we always need to analyze the correctness and runtime of our algorithm. (Remember the process we outlined for the Stable Matching problem.)

    This is the last time I will give you this reminder this semester. These are the rules of algorithms.

  • Even though I give hints about how to solve a problem, make sure you state the algorithm from the given input--not the state that I hint you should use for the algorithm. Analyze the runtime from the given input, not from some intermediary step.
  • Make sure you give me [all of] the output requested in the problem (not just part of the output).
  • Run through your algorithm on examples to find errors or omissions. Make your work clear so that I know that you know what you're doing.

Honor Code Policy

Open brain, your notes, your (and only your) problem sets, solutions on our class's Sakai resources, your wiki, my slides, and the textbook.

Closed everything else.

There should be no discussion of the exam with peers, e.g., nothing about how hard/easy it is, how much time certain problems take to solve, what types of problems there are, etc. There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss the exam after the submission deadline.