To complete before meeting
Nothing to prep, just bring yourself and your enthusiasm. We will use our first meeting to introduce ourselves and brainstorm our plans for the seminar.
There are many possible arcs for exploration, and want to discuss as a group so we can select topics to fit the interests of the cohort. Your input is welcomed! Any topic that connects to CS106B is fair game. Be sure to attend the first week's meeting so you can weigh in with your input.
Possible topics
Our broad thematic focus is on Algorithms, those inner recipes that guide the systems powering our modern world. Here are some algorithmic techniques that build on the CS106B material that we could look into:
- Search engines, Google Page Rank
- Binary search, divide-and-conquer
- Hashing, checksums, fingerprints
- Error correction, parity, hamming/Gray codes, erasure codes
- Data compression, run-length encoding, Burroughs-Wheeler, LZW
- Pattern recognition, nearest neighbors
- Encryption, public key cryptography
- Regular expressions, string matching, Boyer-Moore, Knuth-Morris-Pratt
- Simulation, Monte Carlo, Markov chains
- Sorting (any and all kinds)
- Relational databases, queries, transaction processing
- Fractals
- Recursion (tail call elimination, memoization, dynamic programming)
- MapReduce
- Fast Fourier transform
- Generating and solving mazes
- Newton's method for finding root
- A* search
- Bitwise tricks
- Knuth's Dancing Links
- Skip lists
- Balanced trees (AVL, red-black, splay)
- Tries and dawgs
- Suffix arrays and suffix trees
- Graph algorithms (shortest path, minimum spanning tree)
- John Carmack's fast inverse square root
Here are some other topics that are less algorithmic, but would made good discussion fodder around code and computer science:
- Code reading, code reviews, best practices
- Efficiency, profilers, performance tuning
- Ethics of algorithms, hidden bias, privacy
- Open-source software, community ethos, Cathedral and Bazaar