Exam is Closed Book
Qualifying Exam Syllabus for COMPSCI 531
- Design Techniques: Divide-and-conquer, recurrence relations, greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, randomization.
- Sorting and searching: various sorting algorithms, worst case and average case analysis, linear time selection.
- Data structures: Heaps, binary search trees, height balanced trees, amortization, union-find, hashing.
- Graph algorithms: graph traversal, biconnectivity, strongly connected components, topological sorting, minimum spanning trees, shortest paths, max flow, min cut.
- Geometric algorithms: closest pair, convex hull
- Algebraic algorithms: polynomial multiplication, FFT
- Intractability: Easy and hard problems, NP-Completeness, reducibility, approximation algorithms.
References:
- T. Cormen, C. Leiserson, R. Rivest, and C. Stein, Introduction to Algorithms, MIT Press. (Chapters 1-13, 15-17, 21-26, 34-35).
- S. Dasgupta, C. Papadimitriou, U. Vazirani, Algorithms, McGraw-Hill.
- J. Kleinberg and E. Tardos, Algorithm Design, Addison Wesley (Chapters 1-8, 11.1-11.4).
Sample Exams: