December 31, 2004
[Announcements] Welcome to the CS 312 website
This is the website for CS 312, section 003 only, it will be used for everything except grades. Grades will be kept in blackboard. 312 is a fun introduction to algorithm analysis. We will analyze algorithms in terms of performance and correctness. We will look at performance from both a theoretical and an emperical perspective. For many 312 students, the projects in 312 are their first exposure to the problem of making a program "go fast" rather than just making it work enough to pass off.
This version of 312 will require the use of Microsoft VisualStudio .net. I firmly believe that the Microsoft development platform is under-represented in our classes. The overwhelming majority of you that end up in software development careers will use Microsoft tools all day, every day. Unfortunately, the majority of our graduates have little or no experience with these tools. Of course, a good CS graduate can pick it up in a matter of days or weeks--it is just a development environment after all. You will not become a VisualStudio expert at the end of 312, but you will get a glipse of what you can do with these tools and see that is it indeed just another development enviornment with its own strengths and weaknesses.
VisualStudio is installed in our windows labs in the CS department (which, as you may have noticed, are eerily quiet most of the time). I will post details on how to obtain a free copy of VisualStudio .net soon...
Posted by jones at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)
[VisualStudio] How to get VisualStudio for free
[BYU CS MSDNAA] A few BYU students took the initiative to get our department into the MicroSoft Developers Network Academic Alliance (Steven Helut and McKay Salisbury among others). That means you can get a free copy of Visual Studio if you are taking at least 1 CS class. Visit the above website for details on how to do it. There is about a week of latency.
Posted by jones at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)
December 30, 2004
[Projects] Rooted supertree methods in phylogenetics
[Rooted supertree method, Google Search: "a supertree method for rooted trees' ] Its a divide and conquer algorithm with real application from the literature that isn't too complicated to understand. That makes it a great 312 divide and conquer project. Hopefully we can find some real data to run it on.
Posted by jones at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2004
[Projects] Background on Needleman/Wunsch DNA alignment
[A nice introduction to the algorithm] This might make an interesting dynamic programing project. I don't understand the biological implications or meaning of DNA alignment though.
Posted by jones at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
[Projects] Background on neighbor joining method
[The original paper, Lecture notes, a good discusion] This might be an interesting project. It appears to be a greedy algorithm with no clear objective function.
Posted by jones at 11:12 AM
[Projects] Setting Command Line Parameters
For many projects, you will need to pass your netID and a database filename in on the command line. Here's how to do that...
Choose "Project |
Then add the arguements under "Command arguements." For most projects, add the name of the database first followed by your netid. So for the Crossing the Desert project, I have to following:
Command arguements: desert.mdb mdj
Posted by jones at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)