Pandu Rangan on teaching algorithms

Presented on 10th Nov 2011

Using stories, philosophy to related CS technique to real life/ancient wisdom

“If we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it” = principe of DP

Principle of optimality: allows a recursive formulation, independent of DP technique

Decrease and Conquer

• breaking twigs story
• Hercules baring the tail story
• principle of elimnination
  • who am i?
  • I am NOT my name

Celebrity problem

• application in server farm (P2P system)
• is one server becoming a super server (has all the data)
  • does not need to query other servers for info