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Does anyone have any suggestions about problems I could give to my students as a class practice.
I'd like to give them something that's not boring, but will make them think algorithmically and originally. Maybe some real life problems?
I'd like to be able motivate ALL of them, not just gifted ones. And I'd like to make them work together on solving the problems, so I'm avoiding sterile statistical problems.
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What Is an Algorithm? An algorithm is a set of instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task. One common example of an algorithm is a recipe, which consists of specific instructions for preparing a dish or meal.
Recipes. Just like sorting papers and even tying your shoes, following a recipe is a type of algorithm. The goal of course being to create a duplicated outcome. In order to complete a recipe you have to follow a given set of steps.
Algorithms are all around us. Common examples include: the recipe for baking a cake, the method we use to solve a long division problem, the process of doing laundry, and the functionality of a search engine are all examples of an algorithm.
Algorithms are commonly used to solve certain types of computational problems. We can often describe such a problem by specifying a relationship between input and output. The sorting problem, for example, can be described like this: Input: a sequence a1, a2, ..., an of n numbers.
I find backtracking algorithms to solve the 8 queens puzzle and Sudoku puzzles to be very interesting. When my TA ran code that solved a Sudoku and outputted the solution to the puzzle, there wasn't a person in the room who wasn't slightly inspired. Many of the examples of various statistical related algorithms are available at http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/sp11/lectures.html
The main point of interest for many of the algorithms presented in this class have to do in the context of the Pacman game, using A* to help Pacman find his way through a maze or algorithms that bolster Hidden Markov Models to help Pacman avoid his enemies. This to me during undergraduate studies was a nice departure from the sterile problem sets that many course are notorious for.
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