Lesson 164
Introduction to Algorithms
What, Why & How
1:00A ground-up introduction to what algorithms are, the five properties that define them, how to judge them by correctness and efficiency, and the four major design paradigms.
By the end, you can
- Define algorithm and explain how it differs from a pseudocode description and a program.
- List and explain Knuth's five properties, and distinguish definiteness from effectiveness.
- Explain why correctness requires the right answer for every valid input, not just one test.
- Read a Big-O expression (O(1), O(n), O(n²)) and describe how each grows with input size.
- Identify which design paradigm fits a given problem (brute force, divide and conquer, greedy, dynamic programming, or backtracking).
- Trace Find-Max on a small list, identifying which elements update the running maximum.
Up next in Algorithms & Graph Algorithms
