Question

I thought Assignment 1 was quite challenging. It took me almost 2 hours to do it (yikes). The math in Assignment 2 (Diophantine equations) might be a bit over my head. I'm curious how much harder the remaining assignments are (in terms of the time it takes to get it done)...

Answer 1

I agree the math in this course is excessive (and uneeded for the purpose at hand). Personaly I'm just writing programs of my own design that fulfill the lesson. I.e. in assignment 1, since I don't know and don't care to learn how to count primes, I wrote a program to count the number of threes in a given range. That took 15 min. and it's close enough to the origional assignment for me to understand the lesson.

Answer 2

I think problem set 8 is by far the hardest in all the problem sets. With that said, the difficulty will oscillate a lot. I found all the math based problem sets fairly easy, and Scrabble ones a bit hard, since I didn't really know what Scrabble was/never played it, so some patterns were a bit tricky to find. What I do think is that after problem set 8, everything will simplify by a good bunch.

On a note: this is an Introduction to Comp. Sci., not to Programming. It should have some mathy problem sets.

Answer 3

I also had a hard time understanding the problem - I'm not sure if I understood the problemset right - but using the hint on problem 3 will reduce the math to finding the combinations of McNug's - and that made it a little bit easier for me.

Answer 4

2 hours isn't really too long to complete all of problem set 1 if you're learning the math and programming language as you go. I've been doing the assignments in C# for my own purposes, and even understanding the math problem set 1 took a bit over an hour including finding proper syntax for a few things I wanted to do with the assignment.

To Jedi above, I don't think counting by 3's really encompasses what the problem was trying to teach. You'll get the loop and conditional testing down, but the assignment also subtly addresses the impact of how loop cycles can affect speed of the program. Your program will have exactly 1000 loop calls as it cycles through, while testing to the 1000'th prime you will have many many thousands more depending how you test those primes, and using math to reduce those calls (by at least half) imo was a big part of the assignment.

Answer 5

I agree that problem set 8 was the most difficult, although I haven't started the last problem set yet. I actually stopped moving forward for quite some time as I was working through pset8. If you get stuck, just post your code and a specific question and you'll be fine!

Answer 6

edit: I thought problem set 6 was the worst, not 8. Specifically, finding all possible subsets of letters in a scrabble hand.