Algorithm

Introduction

In the past few years, “problem-solving” seems to have become a trend. When students majoring in computer science go for interviews with big companies, they are required to solve problems. Even non-computer science students are expected to solve problems during interviews. It seems that if you don’t solve problems, you will fall behind others and be eliminated by the company.

Actually, I have never been fond of the term “problem-solving”, mainly because of the word “solving”. I don’t know how you interpret this word, but I feel that there is a sense of “solving problems just for the sake of solving problems”, just like the tactic of solving a lot of problems. Although this tactic can be effective if used properly, I always feel that many people will end up with the mentality of “I can solve the problems I have seen, but I can’t solve the ones I haven’t seen”. If that’s the case, I don’t think it’s a good thing.

I have written an article before: What should we learn when we are learning to code?, which briefly discusses this issue.

In short, I prefer to use the phrase “programming problem-solving” to express what I want to say, rather than the term “problem-solving”.

Read More

Introduction

Recently, I just finished CS50 Week3, and the topic of this week is: Algorithms. It introduces several classic sorting algorithms, such as selection sort, bubble sort, insertion sort, and merge sort.

As a software engineer, I think we can never escape from sorting algorithms. After all, this is one of the classic algorithms! Instead of preparing for interviews in a mess every time, it’s better to organize a post now to record the experience of each sorting algorithm and help ourselves to integrate.

Therefore, this post will use JavaScript to implement various classic sorting algorithms.

The sorting algorithms implemented this time will be sorted from small to large, and for convenience, each sorting algorithm “will directly modify the original array”. But if you don’t want to modify the original, it’s easy. Just add arr = arr.slice() at the beginning of each function to copy the original.

Also, because it is difficult to put animations in the article, I can only put some pictures. If you want to learn with visualized algorithms, I highly recommend VISUALGO. This website will definitely take your understanding of sorting to the next level.

Read More

Introduction

When writing programs, we often use the “search” function. The simplest search is to find the number you want in a string of numbers, which is also our topic today.

This article will be divided into three parts. The first part will introduce the linear search method, the second part will introduce the binary search method, and the last part will discuss the different implementation methods of the binary search method under different conditions.

Read More