Data Structures: Information for foreign students

(Updated 12.3.2002)

How to take part to the Data Structures course in spring 2002

THERE WILL NOT BE QUESTIONS IN ENGLISH IN THE 2ND COURSE EXAMINATION, BECAUSE THERE WERE NO STUDENTS, WHO NEEDED ENGLISH QUESTIONS IN THE 1ST COURSE EXAMINATION! Passing the course by only one course examination is not possible in practice: you would need ALL the points to get 1-/3.

Only one foreign student expressed interest to the Data Structures course before the course started. And that is certainly too little for an English exercise group.

There are some problems:

The course material in WWW is in Finnish, and it is not clearly based on any book, neither English nor Finnish.
The exercises are based on this unique Finnish material.

Some parts of the course are, anyhow, related to a book written in English:

Mark Allen Weiss: Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in Java. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

My suggestion is:

The English speaking students are allowed to take part to the two examinations of the course:

Monday 13.3., 16-20, Porthania I
Wednesday 10.4., 16-20, Main Building, hall 1

And I can make questions in English, based on the Weiss' book. All the 30+30 points come from the examinations; The Finnish students get 24+24 and 12 from the exercises. Points needed for passing are normally 30. If you are going to take part to an examination, please remind me a couple of weeks before the examination day! Otherwise there will be no English questions...

What to read in the Weiss' book

The contents and style of programming in Weiss are quite different from the Finnish course. So there is not very clear correspondence between those two.

For the first examination, Monday 11.3.
- 1.4, 1.5, 1.7, Exercises: 1.13, 1.14
- 2.1-2.4.2, 2.4.4-2.4.6, Exercises: 2.7, 2.10-2.12, perhaps others, too?
- All of chapter 3, Exercises: 3.1-3.10, perhaps others, too?
- 4-4.3, Exercises: 4.1-4.4, 4.9
- One foreign student asked last year: "To be brief, I am having trouble with the data structures course and was wondering if there are any answers available for the Weiss exercises. I checked the web but there didn't appear to be any. My problem is not the programming side but rather the algorithm analysis part. In particular answers to 2.7 would be the most useful. Another point is that the questions are not always clear in exercise 3.9 and 3.10 what does it exactly mean for two lists to be joined by an AND or an OR?"
  As far as I know there are no Weiss' solutions in the Net. About 2.7: You should be able to estimate the O-classes, but no formal proofs are expected. And don't panic with the math; we leave it mostly to the course of Algorithm Analysis. Here it is enough to be able to estimate, compare and talk of different solutions in the jargon of O-analysis.
  About 3.9 and 3.10: These exercises are about implementing sets as lists, those operations are set intersection and set union.
For the second examination, Wednesday 10.4.
- 4.3, 4.4, Exercises: 4.9, 4.19, 4.21, 4.25, 4.26
- 5-5.5, Exercises: 5.1, 5.2, 5.8, 5.10
- 6-6.3.3, 6.4.2-6.5, Exercises: 6.2, 6.3, 6.6, 6.12, 6.14
- 7-7.2.1, 7.4(not the analysis), 7.5(not the analysis), 7.6(not the analysis), 7.7(not the analysis 7.7.5 and 7.7.6), Exercises: 7.1, 7.2, 7.4, 7.11, 7.12, 7.15, 7.19, 7.23, (7.24)
- 9-9.1.1, 9.3-9.3.1, Exercises: 9.5, (9.9)