Udacity Algorithms Course
3 weeks into the Udacity course on Algorithms taught by Professor Michael Littman. So far we’ve worked through:
- multiplication, induction, recurrence.
- big theta, graphs.
- basic graph algorithms.
The course is giving me a more formal introduction to a lot of material that I already have learned in a scattered and individual manner. Big theta and Big OH are specifically helpful to formalize because they are easy and useful once you get over the intimidating textbook teaching methods associated with those topics.
Professor Littman delivers the material in an easy-to-digest way, and constantly relates things back to social network graphs to keep the practicality in sight. Problem sets take about two hours to complete each week, and have a mix of theory and code implementation (in python). I’d say the problem sets are difficult enough to ensure the material is understood, while also being tame enough so as to not scare students away.
It’s a very good course … so far.
