Assignments (Spring’22)

There will be a total of 13 assignments, roughly one every week.

The problems in the assignments have been carefully chosen in order to provide an opportunity to learn deeper. Remember that one of the goals of the class is to provide the conceptual tools so that you can come up with solutions to new problems on your own. The assignments are working towards this goal. Do not expect to sit down for an hour and solve everything at once (if you do, please let us know!). Instead, expect a process: read the problems, understand what they are asking, come up with initial ideas, figure out why they work or not, try to formulate questions, come up with improvements. The whole process is supposed to be interactive between you and your homework partner, your TAs, and myself.

• Team work: For each assignment you may choose to work alone, or with (at most) one partner.

  • Partner collaboration policy: You and your partner will work together on the assignment throughout the whole process, you will write it and review it together, and will submit one assignment. The assignment must be a true joint effort, equally owned, created and understood by all members of the team. Specifically splitting the assignment, and working on problems separately is not allowed and violates the honor code for the class. Assignments are at collaboration-level 1, that is, you and your partner can collaborate verbally with other teams without solution sharing. Please check the collaboration policies.

• Gradescope. The assignments are posted on Gradescope, and you need to submit your solution using Gradescope. The team member who submits should add the other members to the “team” (team assignments have been enabled in Gradescope). Only submit one assignment per team. That is, only one member of the team should submit the assignment

Assignment Guidelines

Credit: inspired by […] most recently by Stanford University, cs161

• Please type. Feel free to annotate the pdf to add figures and formulas.

• Write each problem on a separate page (this leaves us space to write comments)

• One of the skills you’ll develop is how to communicate algorithms clearly. We expect homework problems to be clear and easily human-readable.

• Your homeworks should be typed (unless the homework guidelines ask you to hand-write) and clearly written with complete sentences and well-organized logic, and should definitely not be your first draft.

• When the problem asks for an algorithm, please write pseudocode. Pseudocode should be clear enough that a student who took 1101 can understand what your algorithm is doing, and could implement it in a language of their choice, without thinking too hard.

• It is good practice to include an English description of what your pseudocode is doing, to help out the reader.

• Try to put yourself in the position of the reader. If you hadn’t been thinking of this problem for 3 hours, would your answers make sense to you?

• Try to finish the homework early, then step away for a day or two, and then come back to it and read it again. Chances are you’ll find something you can write more clearly.

• Look at the posted solutions for style advise.

• Remember the office hours and come talk to us. The homeworks are not exams—they are not there to test you— they are there to create opportunities to learn. We expect everyone to do well on the homework, and to take the time to write carefully.

• With quick questions, send me an email. I respond the same day.