Coffee & Algorithms: Graph Algorithms, Transportation Networks & Joy
The theme of this week is: transportation!
We'll be going over pretty easy graph algorithms for this one as we were fairly ambitious the last few times.
Find if a path exists in a graph https://leetcode.com/problems/find-if-path-exists-in-graph/description/
Review Number of Provinces problem we white boarded last week- https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-provinces/description/
This is more of a sharpening our skills week. When is it a good idea to use a graph for an algorithm problem? How should we represent a graph?
Minimal screens! Lots of whiteboarding! Hopefully we'll spin out a Swift Playground or pretty Jupyter Notebook by the end of the session.
Japanese bullet train
What We'll Do
Focus will be on implementation of an interesting algorithm, and testing to see how effective it is. We'll be implementing in python but with no screens, just whiteboarding :)
TIPS AND TRICKS
This is for people of all levels, since everyone is at all levels of practice. If you’re rusty on graphs, then start on your trees, and if you’re rusty on your trees, then brush up to linked lists.
If at any point you’re lost just speak up! Just work your way backwards if you get confused or are rusty! We did this with Jade at the algebraic data types workshop in Rust at our women and non-binary hacknight.
An American Stroad - not quite a street, not quite a road
MAKE ALGORITHMS MEANINGFUL AGAIN
We think that programming is inherently fun, more fun than most any game. It pushes our minds and gives us fundamentals to tackle bigger problems. Algorithms are also great for learning new ways of doing things in different programming languages.
Somewhere along the way job interviews have made algorithms a joyless, high stakes exercise 🙁 . A lot of us never get to use algorithms in our daily work anyway, and they’re just plain fun.
Gondolas at Ixtapalapa
BUT CAN ALGORITHMS BE ART?
Ideally you should be able to put your studies in a notebook. A few year ago one of our SudoRoom members even drew graph theory and cliques on the sidewalk around the neighborhood in a nearby park.
REQUIREMENTS
Adults 18 and over
Passion!