Instructor: Prof. Rahul Simha Office Hours: Tuesdays 4-5.30pm, Phillips 717, or by appointment. Class Time/Place: Thursdays 6.10-8.40pm, Tompkins 205 Prerequisites: A course in algorithms, curiosity. Topics: Introduction. An Opener: The Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) problem. The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Games Computers Play: Chess, TicTacToe. The Satisfiability (SAT) problem. Matching, Collaborative Filtering and the Netflix Challenge. ChampAlg tool: Download and instructions Javadoc. Due dates and presentations. Extreme examples from students. Related papers and slides: Dr. Voorhees' slides on TREC William Robert's Netflix paper