At 5:01 PM -0500 7/11/08, Boyd, Todd M. wrote:
Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the class very much. I had never seen
sorting algorithms outside of the Bubble Sort, so learning Pivot, Shell,
etc. was quite a blast.
I used to hang with a bunch of Macintosh software developers. It was
brought to discussion about which sort would be best and everyone
submitted theirs. I won the competition with a Quicksort. They all
wow'ed about how fast it was, but I told them I didn't want to
improve on it any more because I was afraid if I did, it would go
back in time.
Self-balancing data trees and such were a real
eye-opener as to the power of data structures, too.
Self-balancing data trees were one of my favorites -- I even wrote a
Macintosh application showing the operation of a splay binary-tree,
as seen here (for those who have Macs):
http://sperling.com/freeware.php
A splay is based upon how often a search is preformed for a specific
item. The more often the search, the closer the item appears toward
the top of the tree -- thus less time to find it. The up and downside
of the splay is that the tree is balanced each time a search is
preformed -- requiring more time to balance it, but less time to find
the item -- kind of a trade-off that works for some situations. I am
sure that many search engines use a similar approach.
I'm just... glad I don't have to learn it all over again in a classroom
environment. :)
Not me, I would love to be in a classroom again. You would think that
three degrees would burn me out, but just the opposite, I can't get
enough of this stuff -- I'm constantly reading and programming
everything I can lay my hands on.
The only downside of the classroom environment is that I can honestly
learn more from this group et al than I can in a classroom. I just
don't see academia keeping up with technology. By time the
instructors prepare their class-notes, their class-notes are outdated
-- or so is my perspective.
Cheers,
tedd
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