Goals

This assignment is designed to help practice the following:

analyzing nested loops for computational complexity
start thinking about functions in terms of big-O

Collaboration policy

For this assignment, you may work alone or with a partner, but you must write up all of your answers yourself. (It is therefore unexpected for two submissions to be completely identical.) You may have at most one partner.

You may also discuss the assignment at a high level with other students. You can discuss the assignment with Anya, our prefect, or any course staff.

You should list any student or course staff with whom you discussed the assignment (you don’t have to include prefect sessions), and the manner of discussion (high level, partner, etc.) in the reflection at the end of the assignment.

If you work alone, you should say so instead.

Assessment

The core requirements for your submission are:

give correct numerical and formulaic answers to all the questions
give accurate justifications for at least three answers
include a reflection in your response to the last question of the assignment

The advanced requirements for your submission are:

satisfy the core requirements
give compelling justifications for all answers
include your collaboration statement in your response to the last question of the assignment

Assignment overview

See the assignment handout for instructions. This is assignment does not require you to write any code.

Reflection

Were there any particular issues or challenges you dealt with in completing this assignment? How long did you spend on this assignment?

Write a brief discussion (a sentence or two is fine) in your response to the last question in the assignment.

Here are some examples:

Reflection:

I had some trouble making sense of question 1(d), so I wrote out the expected print statements on paper first.

I had to refer to my course notes to find out what O(n) and O(n^2) meant

I spent 6 hours on this assignment.
Reflection:

I started late, so I had to rush my explanations.

I really don’t understand how the counts and Big-O are different

I spent 5 hours on this assignment.
Reflection:

This went fine; I couldn’t figure things out some of them right away so I had to type them up and run them with different inputs.

I spent 3.5 hours on this assignment.