Unofficial grades posted
I have posted unofficial grades on the online marks posting.
Official grades will eventually be posted on ROSI, probably after the break.
Have a great holiday and all the best next term!
Exam office hours
I will be holding office hours during the exam period at the following times:
All office hours will take place in BA 4261. Bring any questions (from
past exams, assignments, textbook) you want some help with.
You can also pick up any uncollected term work at these times (hopefully
w4 will be ready by Friday too).
Remember, you can still email me, post to the course board, or ask for
an appointment if you have questions and can't make the above times.
Distinguished Lecturer on Tuesday
I know it's during exams, but if you have time, the following lecture should
be very interesting. We all know Al Gore invented the Internet, but Dr. Kahn
actually did a lot of the work. Here's a bit of his biography and the talk
details. It's not often you get to hear from one of the people who built
the Internet!
Robert Kahn will be the next speaker for our Distinguished Lecture series, this coming Tuesday, December 11 at 11:00am in BA 1180. He will be speaking on "Managing Digital Objects on the Net".
Dr. Kahn has had a distinguished career; in 1972 he demonstrated ARPANET, for which he was a principal architect. After becoming Director of DARPA's Information Preocessing Techniques Office, he started the United State's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government. In 2004 he shared ACM's Turing Award along with Vict Cerf for their design of the TCP/IP protocol which is at the basis of the Internet. Among his many other honours are the National Medal of Technology, presented by President Clinton, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Bush. Dr. Kahn is now President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a not-for-profit organizaton which performs research on strategic development of networked-based information techniques.
w4 Q1b revised
The original statement I wrote for Q1b is false. I have changed the
question so I now ask you to prove a correct statement.
Specifically, I've changed the second part of the iff to read
"v has a child s such that there is no back edge (u,w) such that
u a descedant of s...."
The handout has been updated.
A3 marks posted
Marks for both the written and programming portions of A3 have now
been posted online. The written parts will be returned in class
Tuesday.
p4 posted
All parts (starter code and the data files) are now posted.
w4 posted
The written portion of assignment 4 is now posted on the
Assignments page.
w3 posted
The written portion of assignment 3 has now been released.
It is now posted on the Assignments page.
p3 posted
I'm afraid that posting assignment 3 was delayed by illness.
However, I'm extending the due date by a week.
The programming question is now posted, and the written portion
will be posted shortly.
p2 marks posted
The marks for the programming component of assignment 2 have also
now been posted. The tester we used is posted on the
Assignments page.
w2 marks posted
The marks for the written portion of assignment 2 have now been posted.
You may come by my office (BA 4261) this afternoon to pick up your assignment
(or any other of your uncollected work) if you want to look at it before the
drop deadline this weekend.
Midterm marks posted
Thanks to a bunch of help from the TAs, your midterm test marks are now
posted online. (The midterm paper and its sample solutions are posted
on the Tests page.)
The TAs also promised the assignment marks by the weekend,
so keep checking back.
CDF unavailable this Friday evening
The CDF's infrastructure needs to be brought down for important security updates on Friday, October 26, from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. This will result in the entire CDF system being unavailable for the duration of the outage, including login access to the workstations and the compute servers, the web servers, etc. Wireless network access for CDF accounts should be unaffected. Please terminate any open local or remote sessions to the CDF's computers, and shut down any long-running processes by 6pm on Friday.
p2 extension
As discussed in class today, I'll accept p2 until 5:30pm on Monday, October 29.
Don't forget about our midterm Tuesday morning!
Room for Midterm Test
A reminder that the midterm test, scheduled for
Tuesday, October 30, will be written in SS 1083 (not the usual lecture room).
The test will take place during the usual lecture time.
First faculty research seminar
From CS announcements:
A brief reminder that our first Faculty Research Seminar will take place on Tuesday, October 23, 4-5pm in room BA1200. No registration required -- just show up at 4pm.
Prof. Charles Rackoff will speak on "Computational Complexity and Cryptography". His talk will be followed by pizza and pop and a chance to chat with him.
So take a small break from studying for midterms, grab a bite to eat, and find out about the field of cryptography from one of the top researchers in the area!
Here is a short abstract from Prof. Rackoff:
Computational Complexity involves questions about how efficiently certain problems can be solved. It turns out that for some functions, every algorithm for the function must be extraordinarily inefficient. Although this may seem like a bad thing, it is only because of this fact that secure cryptography might be possible. However, because of deep open questions in computational complexity, we don't actually know whether or not there is any way to do cryptography securely.
p2 posted
The programming question for A2 is now posted.
w2 posted
The second assignment is now posted. A few students asked for an extension,
so I'll accept it until Thursday (the programming will still be due Friday).
p1 marks, tester up
The p1 tester we used is now posted on the
Assignments page,
and the p1 marks are now posted on the CDF site.
w1 marks posted
The marks for the written portion of A1 are now posted online.
You can access them using your CDF account login and password
on the CDF Secure Website.
(This is the first time I'm using this system, so let me know of any problems!)
Be sure to let me know of any errors.
Puzzle challenge
Microsoft is running a fun 12-hour puzzle solving contest next month
that some of you might be interested in.
You are cordially invited to assist us in auditing the estate of Professor Solvem. The audit will take place on November 11, 2007 at 12:00 PM EST. Applications are being accepted at http://www.collegepuzzlechallenge.com/. Teams must have 4 auditors to participate, the available slots will fill on a first-come-first-serve basis, and the top auditors will be handsomely rewarded.
Error in p1 code
Some students have reported an error in the p1 starter code,
in the declaration of increaseElementPriority().
Please see the clarification on the BB or the assignments page.
w1 solution posted
A sample solution to w1 has now been posted to the
Assignments page.
A1 programming question posted
The programming question is now available. Please submit your code
electronically by 5:30pm on Tuesday, October 9 (note the extension).
If you choose to complete the programming question in a group, only
submit ONE copy with both your names inside the file.
Programming assignments: submit early and often!
I shouldn't need to say this, but submit a copy of your programming assignments
early (to make sure you know how to use the submission system well before
the deadline, and that everything with the submission system is set up
correctly). Waiting until the last minute and encountering problems
is not grounds for extension!
Along with this, submit new versions often as you're completing the assignment!
That way, if something comes up and you're unable to complete or submit
your assignment at the deadline, at least you've handed in a partial solution
(and it's good support for requesting special consideration).
Room for Midterm Test
Just some advance warning that the midterm test, scheduled for
October 30, will be written in SS 1083 (not the usual lecture room).
The test will take place during the usual lecture time.
I'll remind you again closer to the test date.
w1 posted
The written portion of assignment 1 has been posted on the
Assignments page.
The programming question will be posted soon!
Please note that the due date for the written portion has been
extended to Thursday, Oct 4.
Help Centre this fall
The Help Centre will be open 4 to 6 p.m., Monday to Thursday in BA 2200 for the rest of the term. They can help both with questions regarding your CS courses and with questions regarding CDF, the undergrad computing system.
Welcome!
Welcome to CSC 263! All course announcements will be posted to this page,
in reverse chronological order. Be sure to check back often.
But first, a few pre-course announcements.
Tutorials start first week
There will be a tutorial held on Thursday, September 13.
It will be a review of proving worst-case running time and
asymptotic notation, slanted to getting you in practice for
solving the types of problems you'll see in this course.
Requesting waivers
If you have not satisfied the course prerequisites, you WILL be
removed from the course sometime in the future, unless you obtain a waiver.
Details on how to obtain a waiver are on the
Course Policies page.
Getting CDF accounts
A few students have asked me about CDF accounts.
Links to the applicable CDF pages, and answers to other frequently asked
questions, are at the bottom of the
Assignments page.
If you have other questions not answered there,
be sure to email me and I'll get them answered.
Script for checking for new announcements
A former student wrote a python script that checks for new announcements.
He wrote:
I am an RSS junkie, moreover, I'm lazy. As a result I have written a small script that checks the course announcements for me (figured it would be good practice), and was wondering if you could host it on the website of students to download. [Note] my use of the 'open' command which is OS specific, but I'm sure everyone will figure that one out. Other than that, simply schedule the thing in a cron like program and you're done.
Here's a link to his Check263 Announcements script. I haven't checked it thoroughly, so I take no responsibility if anything goes wrong with it should you decide to use it. You probably need to read it anyway and change some file locations to fit your own directory structure.
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