173 Exercises and Programming Projects

There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.

--- Meskimen's Law

The written and programming exercises run in parallel. Written exercises "for Week X" are due in hardcopy by Thursday of the following week, either in class or in the box outside Marty's office on 7th floor CSB opposite the elevators. Programming exercises due in Blackboard on the day and time indicated on Blackboard.

Do NOT submit materials that need proprietary products. In other words, nothing from Microsoft. No .doc, NO .docx, no .rar, etc. (zip and tar are OK). Make sure your code works under linux, make sure your project writeups are .pdf. If you need help finding the appropriate utilities, see Google(TM), a classmate, or your TA.

Converting to PDF is getting easier. It's trivial on Macs, and I imagine Windows has an efficient way. I'm told you can convert .doc to .pdf at this DocToPdfConversion site.

Assignments on Blackboard: (Due dates, submissions) Control Panel -> Content Areas (Course Materials) -> Assignments

All assignments are individual except for the optionally-two-person team parser project in Weeks 3-4 of the FLAT segment.

The "Sample Exercises" below are untouched actual assignment writeups and occasional other useful material from student submissions. They are not meant to be templates, especially as regards the form of a scientific report. Most of them are much too informal to be ideal, and basic style and organization is often sub-optimal (see the writing helpers). Content-wise however, there is some inspirational work here, and in fact some of the presentations are terrific too.

("September"): Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Written -- FLAT

Programming -- C

Sample Programming Projects:
C 2008a
C 2008b
C 2008b Readme
C parser 2009

("October"): Logic

Written -- Prop. Logic, FOPC

Programming -- Prolog

Pre-2010 Prolog Programming Projects (Parsing only):
Prolog 2008a
Prolog 2008b
Prolog 2008b Output
Prolog 2009
Parse-Translate 2010 I
Parse-Translate 2010 II

("November") : Functional Programming

Written -- Lambda Calculus

Scheme: Weeks 1 and 2
Weeks 3-4: N-queens

N-queens was introduced in 2009, as being more relevant and less fiddly than the previous "N2 -puzzle". Here are some sample writeups for both:
Scheme N2-puzzle 2008a
Scheme N2-puzzle 2008b
Scheme N Queens Problem 2009

("December"): Matrices and Linear Algebra

Best to work thru the 173 Schedule Page to access these assignments ALONG WITH their associated tutorials and lecture overheads.

Running Matlab is easy from campus. Or you can buy a student version. Otherwise you might want to try X11 Forwarding with SSH.

Programming project: choose ray casting, investigation of gaussian elimination techniques, or differential equation solution.

Ray Casting Traditional assignment:

Sample Ray Casting Projects:
Matlab 2008a
Matlab 2008b
Matlab 2010a
Matlab 2010b

Gaussian Elimination and Pivoting: Do main and extra credit parts.

Sample Pivoting Writeup

ODE Solution Ballistics only: Cannon or Baseball.

Sample Cannon Writeup

More samples of writeups on Gauss Elim. and ODEs can be found at CSC160 Sample Projects

---
This page is maintained by Deer Boy

Last update: 7/1/11