Week 10 – Sorting Big-Oh

                The first thing we did in this lecture this week was getting a better understanding of assignment two. Danny went over the four functions with us for half an hour giving us a complete understanding of what we have to exactly achieve and some ways to achieving the functions requirements. The functions that Danny went over with us were the following: is_regex, all_regex_permutations, regex_match, build_regex_tree. After his talk on each one I understood my task much easier and what it was that I was exactly trying to accomplish for assignment two. After the assignment two help, we moved onto sorting. The first type of sort we covered was quick sort. You have to choose a pivot by deciding with respect to the rest of the list and repeat on the left over slices of the list. We had a digression mid lecture to show what happens if you put a default value of an empty list in a function definition if no value is specified. After that we headed over to merge sort. The idea here is to divide the list in half and merge sort the halves until it is completely sorted. After that you merge the sorted results together.

               

                We got our assignment one marks back and I have to say that I’m really glad with my results. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. The lab this week was not as challenging as the previous labs. I found this one much easier. I was able to complete about three fourths of the lab before running out of time. Midterm test two is coming up and will probably be more challenging than the first one. It’s time for me to start studying. So I’ll have to cut this blog short to stick my head back into my notes and start reviewing.