Exam

Dates and time

Friday, January 5, 2007.

The exam takes place in IMADA's seminar room and U49E.

In the secretaries' office, you must sign up for a specific slot in the sequence of students to be examined on this day. A list is available. The starting time for the first examination is 8:30.

Even though the expected total examination time per student is 30 minutes (see below), it is not possible to calculate the exact examination time from the placement on the list, since students earlier on the list may not show up. Thus, students are expected to show up plenty early. In principle, all students who are taking the exam on a particular date are supposed to show up when the examination starts, i.e., at the time the first student is scheduled. This is partly because of the way external examiners are paid, which is by the number of students who show up for examination. For this particular exam, we do not expect many no-shows, so showing up 1-2 hours before the estimated time of the exam should be safe.

Procedure

When it is your turn for examination, you will draw a question. The list of questions can be found below. Then you will be placed alone in a preparation room. You will have approximately 25-30 minutes of preparation time and you are allowed to use any material that you are bringing yourself.

After the preparation time, the actual exam takes place. This part also lasts approximately 25-30 minutes. You should start by presenting material related to the question you drew. Aim for a reasonable high pace and focus on the most interesting material related to the question. You may bring a short list of keywords for the actual exam to remember what you have decided to present. Thus, you are not supposed to use note material, textbooks, transparencies, computer, etc. for this part.

We, the examinator and the censor, will supplement with specific questions when appropriate, and after a while, we will end the discussion of the exam question that you drew and turn to material from other parts of the curriculum. Note that all of this as well as discussion between examinator and censor about the grade is included in the 30 minutes, so do not count on more than 10-15 minutes for your own presentation.

Some of the questions below are very broad, so you must select the material you choose to cover. You will of course also be evaluated based on your selection of material. If you only present the simplest material, you limit the grade you can obtain. On the other hand, a good presentation of the simple material is better than a very poor presentation of the harder material. For most questions, it is natural to first sketch the data structure and then present essential elements of the analysis. To obtain the best result, you should spend most of your time on the analysis. When two data structures are mentioned in the question, you can still select your material freely. As an example, it is fine to talk only about universal hashing or only about perfect hashing, and this will not in itself limit your grade. We might of course still ask you questions about material that you have decided to skip. Note that for the question "disjoint sets", you should be particularly brief when discussing the structure, since this is really material from an introductory algorithms and data structures course. So, here you should to an even larger extent focus on the amortized analysis.

Curriculum

The curriculum in the course consists of all the material on the literature page at the end of the course plus all the weekly notes. Additionally, you can rely on that you will only be examined in the parts of the material that I have discussed at lectures and discussion sections.

Questions

  1. leftists heaps and skew heaps
  2. skip lists
  3. scapegoat trees
  4. universal and perfect hashing
  5. disjoint sets
  6. disjoint sets with backtracking
  7. making data structures partially persistent
  8. van Emde Boas trees
  9. dynamization of data structures
  10. AVL-trees and other height-balanced search trees
  11. treaps


Last modified: Wed Jan 3 10:54:14 CET 2007
Kim Skak Larsen (kslarsen@imada.sdu.dk)