CSPC 3200: Practical Problem Solving in Computer Science

All slides are in the Portable Document Format (PDF). Use Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these files.

NOTE: The schedule below is very tentative and subject to change.

Week Topics Material Exercises Due
September 9 - 14, 2026 Course introduction, basics: handling input/output, reading the problem, complexity estimates, debugging tips, etc. Slides
September 16 - 21, 2026 Basics, ad hoc problems Slides Eeny Meeny, Fast Food Prizes, A Different Problem, Babelfish September 18
September 23 - 28, 2026 Data structures and libraries Slides Bela Eb Alto Saxophone Player T9 Spelling Ptice September 25
October 5 - October 7, 2026 Complete search, backtracking, divide and conquer Slides Virtual Friends Continuous Median Turbo October 2
October 14 - October 19, 2026 Greedy algorithms, dynamic programming Slides Jumbled Communication A Towering Problem Fruit Baskets Free Weights October 9
October 21 - October 26, 2026 Dynamic programming The Trip, 2007 Convoy
October 28 - November 2, 2026 Graphs, minimum spanning trees Slides 116 497 674 10684
November 4 - November 16, 2026 Shortest path, maximum flow Slides 10004 10047 11228
November 18 - November 23, 2026 Combinatorics, number theory Slides
November 25 - November 30, 2026 String processing, dynamic programming problems Slides 10511 11367
December 2 - December 7, 2026 Suffix arrays, computational geometry 384 10192
December 9 - December 11, 2026 Computational geometry Slides 719 11512

howard.cheng@uleth.ca