CS 297: Championship Algorithms

• 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