I have spent the past few weeks working through both CS50’s Week 2 and 3 assignments, or PSETs as they call them.

Week 2’s lecture tackled arrays while Week 3’s lecture tackles algorithms. As I skimped out on detailing week 2 and 3 as I went through the content, I will only be keeping it brief and not including the code of the content I have done. I will, however, explain the overall things requested to be done just as a refresher for myself.

Week 2 involved what I believe was out first “lab”, where we were allowed to work with other individuals if we so wished. The lab was titled Scrabble, where the goal would be to assign letters of the alphabets points (which were supplied ahead of time) and we would program would the logic to calculate the total score and declare the winner. This lab was a relative simple take on content I was already familiar with, so I dove in alone.

Problem Set 2, in comparison was a little more complex and required you work solo as prior works have done as well. There were three items to do, one of which is optional. Those were: Readability, a program that calculates the grade level readability of a block of text; Caesar (easier), a program that encrypts text by shifting letters over X amount of characters; and Substitution (harder), a program that allows you to create your own character replacement. Of these, the easier and harder have the option to allow you to pick one of the two to do as opposed to having to do both, like prior weeks. I had normally just opted to do both regardless unless they were too similar.

To sum up my experience, Readability was relatively easy-going though I needed some ice breakers of pseudo-code to get myself moving, which is generally expected when starting with a blank slate. I actually did this after doing Caesar as I missed the requirement to do Readability at first. When working on Caesar, the instructions of the assignment were plentiful and informative enough (being the easier of the two) to get me going straight away. I believe this project took me an afternoon to sort through. Substitution, however, took me a while longer with little more to go on and far more complex items to sort through. I recall experiencing a few issues swapping between ints and strings and floats and overall just feeling gummy and messy about what I was doing. I ended up doing some research to better familiarize myself with C’s methods of handling these items before cleaning up the code and submitting it. As someone without a proper background in computer programming languages and a history of web development languages only, this is where things started to turn out to be a bit more difficult as the web’s languages were created far, far later than the archaic C was.

Week 3, in contrast, took me a while. Citing the paragraph above, I am not sure how I would have handled this if I were a student at my current age and experience being held to a weekly deadline. I believe in the mix of work, life, etc. I ended up taking around two or three weeks to resolve this. The context of algorithms and sorting methods are a blank slate for me as someone who took college algebra as their highest math class. I am not opposed to math or learning it, however it was clear that most students in this class had a prerequisite of some form of advanced logarithmic math. The class focused heavily on the term “big O”, or “log”, etc. Concepts I am wholly unfamiliar with. After finishing the course, I took to reaching out to computer science friends who all attempted to share their interpretation or understanding of these concepts, alongside spending an evening reading about concepts of “big O”, and while I grasped most of what they were saying, that was about as far as I got. I could not, by the end, quickly implement the concepts into executions without having to spend extra time processing or reading the concepts all over.

Thankfully, these concepts were only referenced once in the projects. The lab for this week was precisely the understanding of sorting algorithms. Three various sorting methods were introduced to you, and without looking at the code, you were to execute the program and compare the time taken to execute the program in seconds. To give further hints, there were multiple lists supplied you could use to give you assistance, such as pre-sorted, random, and reverse sorted, tied in with various numbers of lines to go through to give further information.

With the lab being designed to ask for assistance, I spent time researching what other people had said, however I did this after using my own attempt to understand what sorting methods were being used. The three available were selection sort, bubble sort, and merge sort. While they are not the only ones available, these were the three used in the project’s various sort methods. I gave me choices and realized that some were wrong. However, as I went through and ready the explanation individuals gave for their own choices, as opposed to reading the answers, I came to the realization I was once again misunderstand the concept of the big O and how its applied. My logic was sound and correct, however my understand of what sorting method that equated to was incorrect. I eventually correctly labeled the sorting methods and moved on.

The problem sets to perform week 3’s algorithms included: Plurality, where you complete a vote tally system; Runoff, where you complete a rank choice voting system; and Tideman, where you complete a tideman election. You are not coding an entire program in these projects, instead you are only completing key pieces that relate to the week’s lecture. This has been one of my few instances so far where I opt to perform only two of the three projects as my time spent on week 3 had already been beyond what I had intended due to the math concepts that were unfamiliar to me. Thankfully, I am appreciative of having enough friends that could likely enlighten me on the subject should the need ever arise again.

Needless to say, completing both Plurality and Runoff, the two I chose, was neither easy nor complicated. A lot of traditional logic went into understanding the requests, however, the immense amount of for loops alongside the modification of structures and 2D arrays were a large mix of old method code that these days are performed in far simpler means.

Overall the past two weeks of lectures have definitely shown that you need a broad mind when entering some of these projects and lectures, and the next week is Memory followed by Data Structures. Finally, then, does the language move onto items I am more familiar with: Python (a more modern language I have not touched much) and SQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.