Programming Challenges
CSE 30872 is an elective course in the Computer Science and Engineering program at the University of Notre Dame. This course encourages the development of practical programming and problem solving skills through extensive practice and guided learning. The bulk of the class revolves around solving brain-teaser and puzzle-type problems that often appear in programming contests, online challenges, and job interviews. Additionally, basic software engineering practices such as planning, debugging, testing, and source code management may be discussed.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
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Parse a variety of inputs and model problems.
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Utilize appropriate data structures to represent and solve problems.
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Implement common problem solving techniques and algorithms.
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Employ modern software development methods and tools.
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Debug and test code within an automated testing environment.
Logistics
Class Information
- Lecture
- M/W/F 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM
- Location
- 317 DeBartolo Hall
- Mailing List (Class)
- fa18-cse-30872-01-group@nd.edu
- Mailing List (Staff)
- fa18-cse-30872-01-staff-list@nd.edu
- Slack
- #cse-30872-fa18
- GitLab
- nd-cse-30872-fa18
Instructor
- Instructor
- Peter Bui (pbui@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- M/W/F 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM, and by appointment
- Office Location
- 350 Fitzpatrick Hall
Help Protocol
- Think
- Slack
- Think
- Think
- Office
Teaching Assistants
- Teaching Assistant
- Natalie Alvarez (nalvare1@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- F 11:20 AM - 12:20 PM
- Office Location
- Engineering Library
- Teaching Assistant
- Alex Ayala (aayala4@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- F 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
- Office Location
- Innovation Lab
- Teaching Assistant
- Jacob Beiter (jbeiter@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- W 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
- Office Location
- Innovation Lab
- Teaching Assistant
- Alison Lui (alui@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- W 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
- Office Location
- Innovation Lab
- Teaching Assistant
- Grace Milton (gmilton@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- TH 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
- Office Location
- Innovation Lab
- Teaching Assistant
- Catalina Vajiac (cvajiac@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- TH 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
- Office Location
- Innovation Lab
- Teaching Assistant
- Noah Yoshida (nyoshida@nd.edu)
- Office Hours
- T 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
- Office Location
- Innovation Lab
Schedule
| Unit | Date | Topics | Assignment |
|---|---|---|---|
| I/O | 08/22 | Introduction, I/O Slides Slides | Reading 00 |
| 08/24 | Complexity, Coding Style Slides Slides | Challenge 00 | |
| Sequence Containers | 08/27 | Arrays, Lists Slides | Reading 01 |
| 08/29 | Stacks, Queues Slides | Challenge 01 | |
| 08/31 | Debugging Slides | Challenge 02 | |
| Searching, Sorting | 09/03 | Searching Slides | Reading 02 |
| 09/05 | Engineering Industry Day | Challenge 03 | |
| 09/07 | Sorting Slides | Challenge 04 | |
| Associative Containers | 09/10 | Maps, Sets Slides | Reading 03 |
| 09/12 | Hash Tables | Challenge 05 | |
| 09/14 | Testing / Profiling Slides | Challenge 06 | |
| Complete Search | 09/17 | Subsets and Permutations Slides | Reading 04 |
| 09/19 | Backtracking | Challenge 07 | |
| 09/21 | Static Analysis Slides | Challenge 08 | |
| Greedy Algorithms | 09/24 | Optimization Slides | Reading 05 |
| 09/26 | Compression | Challenge 09 | |
| 09/28 | Git Tricks Slides | Challenge 10 | |
| Dynamic Programming | 10/01 | Memoization Slides | Reading 06 |
| 10/03 | Table Building | Challenge 11 | |
| 10/05 | Dredd Slides | Challenge 12 | |
| In-class Contest I | 10/08 | Contest I | |
| 10/10 | Contest I | ||
| 10/12 | Contest I | ||
| Fall Break | |||
| Trees | 10/22 | Representation, Traversal Slides | Reading 07 |
| 10/24 | Divide and Conquer | Challenge 13 | |
| 10/26 | Documentation Slides | Challenge 14 | |
| Graphs I | 10/29 | Representation, Traversal Slides | Reading 08 |
| 10/31 | Shortest Paths | Challenge 15 | |
| 11/02 | Building Slides | Challenge 16 | |
| Graphs II | 11/05 | Spanning Trees Slides | Reading 09 |
| 11/07 | Topological Sorting | Challenge 17 | |
| 11/09 | Packaging Slides | Challenge 18 | |
| Graphs III | 11/12 | Paths Slides | Reading 10 |
| 11/14 | Flows and Cuts | Challenge 19 | |
| 11/16 | Dredd | Challenge 20 | |
| Number Theory | 11/19 | Primes and Modular Arithmetic Slides | Reading 11 |
| 11/21 | Thanksgiving | Challenge 21 | |
| 11/23 | Thanksgiving | ||
| Miscellaneous | 11/26 | Brain Teasers Slides | Challenge 22 |
| 11/28 | Graduate School Slides | Challenge 23 | |
| 11/30 | Slacking and Hacking | Challenge 24 | |
| Final | 12/03 | Contest II | |
| 12/05 | Contest II | ||
| Final | 12/12 | ||
Requirements
Coursework
| Component | Points |
|---|---|
| Readings Weekly reading assignments. | 10 × 2 |
| Challenges Weekly programming challenges. | 24 × 6 |
| Style Programming style for each challenge. | 24 × 1 |
| External External programming contest. | 30 |
| Contests In-class programming contests. | 2 × 36 |
| Participation Regular class attendation and contribution to course community. | 10 |
| Total | 300 |
Grading
| Grade | Points | Grade | Points | Grade | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 285-300 | A- | 270-284 | ||
| B+ | 260-269 | B | 250-259 | B- | 240-249 |
| C+ | 230-239 | C | 220-229 | C- | 210-219 |
| D | 195-209 | F | 0-194 |
Due Dates
All Readings and Challenges are to be submitted to your own private GitLab repository. Unless specified otherwise:
- Readings are due before class on the Monday of each week.
- Challenges are due before class on the Friday of each week. This is a soft deadline for the first attempt. Final submissions are due at noon on the Saturday of each week.
Policies
Participation
Students are expected to attend and contribute regularly in class. This means answering questions in class, participating in discussions, and helping other students.
Foreseeable absences should be discussed with the instructor ahead of time.
Academic Honesty
Any academic misconduct in this course is considered a serious offense, and the strongest possible academic penalties will be pursued for such behavior. Students may discuss high-level ideas with other students, but at the time of implementation (i.e. programming), each person must do his/her own work. Use of the Internet as a reference is allowed but directly copying code or other information is cheating. It is cheating to copy, to allow another person to copy, all or part of an exam or a assignment, or to fake program output. It is also a violation of the Undergraduate Academic Code of Honor to observe and then fail to report academic dishonesty. You are responsible for the security and integrity of your own work.
Late Work
In the case of a serious illness or other excused absence, as defined by university policies, coursework submissions will be accepted late by the same number of days as the excused absence.
Otherwise, there is a penalty of 25% per day late (except where noted). You may submit some parts of an assignment on time and some parts late. Each submission must clearly state which parts it contains; no part can be submitted more than once.
Students with Disabilities
Any student who has a documented disability and is registered with Disability Services should speak with the professor as soon as possible regarding accommodations. Students who are not registered should contact the Office of Disabilities.
CSE Guide to the Honor Code
For the assignments in this class, you may discuss with other students and consult printed and online resources. You may quote from books and online sources as long as you cite them properly. However, you may not look at another student's solution, and you may not look at solutions.
The following table summarizes how you may work with other students and use print/online sources:
| Resources | Solutions | |
|---|---|---|
| Consulting | Allowed | Not Allowed |
| Copying | Cite | Not Allowed |
See the CSE Guide to the Honor Code for definitions of the above terms.
If an instructor sees behavior that is, in his judgement, academically dishonest, he is required to file either an Honor Code Violation Report or a formal report to the College of Engineering Honesty Committee.
Resources
Information
- Competitive Programmer's Handbook This is our main textbook for the semester. It contains background information regarding the algorithms and data structures we will be utilizing and implementing to solve different problems.
- Competitive Programming Library This contains a list of topics and links to resources to help students become competitive at programming contests.
- Hacking a Google Interview This site has information about common questions and concepts often used in technical programming interviews, along with some answers to the questions.
- 500 Data Structures and Algorithms practice problems and their solutions This is a long list of common data structures and algorithm problems.
- Top 10 Algorithms and Data Structures for Competitive Programming This is another list of common data structures and algorithms.
Online Challenges
- UVa Online Judge This site is an online judge for programming challenges found in the book Programming Challenges
- HackerRank This site is contains a variety of programming challenges similar to what is found in ACM programming contests. It also includes non-programming contest type problems as well and is a platform for evaluating and testing your programming skills.
- LeetCode This is another site that contains a variety of programming challenges.
- TopCoder This is another site that contains a variety of programming challenges. It also periodically runs contests and learning resources.
- Project Euler This site is a large set of mathematical and programming problems designed to test your abilities and sharpen your skills. The problems make for good practice.
- Google Code Jam This is global programming competition where programmers test their skills by solving multiple rounds of algorithmic puzzles.
- Advent of Code This is an annual series of programming challenges.