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About this unit

We've partnered with Dartmouth college professors Tom Cormen and Devin Balkcom to teach introductory computer science algorithms, including searching, sorting, recursion, and graph theory. Learn with a combination of articles, visualizations, quizzes, and coding challenges.
What are algorithms and why should you care? We'll start with an overview of algorithms and then discuss two games that you could use an algorithm to solve more efficiently - the number guessing game and a route-finding game.
Learn how to use asymptotic analysis to describe the efficiency of an algorithm, and how to use asymptotic notation (Big O, Big-Theta, and Big-Omega) to more precisely describe the efficiency.
Use the recursive technique to solve the Towers of Hanoi, a classic mathematical puzzle and one reportedly faced by monks in a temple.
Learn how to describe graphs, with their edges, vertices, and weights, and see different ways to store graph data, with edge lists, adjacency matrices, and adjacency lists.
Learn how to traverse a graph using breadth-first-search to find a particular node or to make sure you've visited all the nodes, traversing one layer at a time.
Ideas of how you could continue your learning journey in algorithms.