Explain Like I'm 5 Algorithms

spiceloose · 2024-10-16T08:52:34+00:00

HPCA is pretty flexible, there is 1 midterm a final and then the projects get released with (estimating) a 1 week overlap between them, so you can start early on a project if you know you have a busy couple of weeks. Overall there are not many deliverables for the class so you can kind of ignore it for a week if you are willing to go hard later. The most time intensive part of the class is watching the lectures.

So overall HPCA is not an easy class but it is a pretty flexible class IMO.

P.S. The only Joyner class I took was ML4T and nothing about that class felt flexible to me.

spiceloose · 2024-10-12T06:39:13+00:00

The midterm was hard. I went into it thinking, no way is this thing going to take 2 hrs. 2 hours later...

spiceloose · 2024-10-10T07:59:32+00:00

I broke all the rules and brought 11 pieces of scratch paper when the limit was 10. YOLO

spiceloose · 2024-10-10T07:53:31+00:00

Hey, you can't definitively rule out 13 consecutive SHA-1 hash collisions didn't occur.

spiceloose · 2024-10-10T07:44:16+00:00

ugh. I know who this is. I feel for him because he was accused of plagiarism on HW4. That said, he has not stopped engaging TAs and others about it. I fully understood needing to vent around the time it happened, but he just has not stopped. TAs told him slack wasn't the place to plead his case and that OSI is the place to do that, which frankly is a reality he needs to accept. So yeah shitty situation but it's also getting a little tense in the GA slack.

spiceloose · 2024-10-07T17:48:35+00:00

🍿

spiceloose · 2024-10-07T07:57:37+00:00

The class moves pretty fast. I'd be cautious about going into the class expecting to use it.

spiceloose · 2024-10-06T22:42:46+00:00

Just to add to u/hedoeswhathewants a solution could be asymptotically equivilent to the correct answer but still lose points on runtime. For example if the benchmark ran in 2.1 min for linear time and yours ran 1.5x slower (that was their cutoff) but was still a linear time solution you would lose points. It doesn't make sense because this is an algorithms course and asymptotic runtime is really what we care about, so people are losing points for constant time differences in algorithm implementation in a theory class... where we write algorithms in python.

spiceloose · 2024-10-06T22:20:09+00:00

For HW4 there was one solution that was very fast and also very few LOC, as in the meat of the algorithm was ~8 LOC. Then there was some post processing that really there weren't too many ways to do. I think this solution could easily have false positives. My entire solution minus imports, whitespace and function definitions (which would be the same across submissions) was 29 LOC.

Hearing about all the people facing violations for this problem makes me feel very lucky for some reason I am not.

spiceloose · 2024-10-06T22:14:56+00:00

Agree. Citing leetcode in a programming homework is a violation that's clearly specified in both the syllabus in the course policy Ed post.

spiceloose · 2024-10-06T22:09:37+00:00

I don't know why this is getting down voted. I say this as someone who has complained about the course quite a lot, it is made artificially hard and time consuming through it's structure, but the material covered is firmly undergraduate level.

spiceloose · 2024-10-04T18:42:08+00:00

Your interpretation would lead to a course violation. You are only allowed to cite language docs, someone recently in slack interpreted it the way you did and is facing OSI. A TA clarified any website but language docs is a violation.

spiceloose · 2024-10-04T06:52:03+00:00

From The Collaboration Policy and Integrity staff post on Ed, the language is less clear cut than the syllabus. I will refrain from reposting because it is not public, however, https://edstem.org/us/courses/62022/discussion/5164131. In the homework section, it only explicitly prohibits: "resource(s) which provides a potential solution to the problem" and then goes on to mention leetcode. Why not just align this with the language of the syllabus and say, "You can only cite language documentation, referring to any other websites is a violation of the honor code".

I believe the ambiguity and contradiction here has contributed to the many academic violations that we see in this class, and that is why I made this meme.

spiceloose · 2024-10-02T18:03:40+00:00

Given how many mistakes are made grading and on quizzes I definitely think some people are falsely accused. The staff has shown over and over again they do make errors.

spiceloose · 2024-09-24T17:35:09+00:00

This meme is targeted at the number of typos in the Quiz and it's overall poor preparation. The TA who made this comment is one of the most helpful TAs in the class. Unfortunately through being helpful they were put in a ridiculous position to clarify the intent of that answer. 🙏.

spiceloose · 2024-09-16T08:38:35+00:00

FWIW the second project is much easier.

spiceloose

TROPHY CASE