Learning Journal: Design and Analysis of Algorithms week #1

Spring 2026 CSUMB Design and Analysis is the first class of the new year! Our cohort is expected to graduate this December, and I am really looking forward to completing my degree. This first week in Design and Analysis was quite jam-packed with material. Most of it was review, as some of our earlier classes exposed us to these concepts. Although it was mostly an overview of many different topics, it felt like a precursor to the challenges that lie ahead. We went over the basic principles of pseudocode and how helpful it can be when designing an algorithm. The whole point of pseudocode is to make it in English but programming-language agnostic. It's meant to serve as the scaffolding used to create an algorithm. Out of all the material we covered, I believe the fake coin puzzle was the most interesting. Solving it with the three comparisons was quite easy. It almost felt like binary search by constantly cutting the dataset in half. But the two-comparison solution was the most intriguing. By withholding two of the coins from the first comparison, it was possible to rule out even more possibilities!

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