Week 7

 Week 7 (2/18-2/24)

This week's content had a lot of topics and algorithms to cover. These are some of the concepts I learned this week:

Counting Sort: Count how many times each value appears (frequency), then build the cumulative distribution to place items in sorted order.

Radix Sort (LSD): Sort numbers digit by digit starting from the least significant digit (ones place), using a stable sort each pass.

Dynamic Programming (DP): Solve problems by storing results of smaller subproblems and building up to the final answer.

Coin-Collecting Problem: In a grid, find the maximum coins collectable when moving only right or down using a DP table.

Coin-Row Problem: Choose coins in a row to maximize value without taking adjacent coins

Warshall’s Algorithm: Finds the transitive closure of a graph (reachability: whether a path exists between vertices).

Floyd’s Algorithm: Finds all-pairs shortest paths by updating distances with intermediate vertices.

Greedy Method: Build a solution step by step by always choosing the best local option at the moment.

MST (Minimum Spanning Tree): Connect all vertices in a weighted graph with the minimum total edge weight and no cycles.

Prim’s Algorithm: A greedy MST algorithm that starts from one vertex and repeatedly adds the smallest edge connecting the current tree to a new vertex (weights matter first; alphabet only breaks ties).