CS 315: Example Questions for Final Exam

Also see the example questions for the Midterm

Trees:

• Why is it important that a search tree be balanced?
• What is the most significant difference between B-trees and balanced binary trees?

Sparse Arrays:

• What is the motivation for having special techniques to store sparse arrays?

Pattern Matching:

• Describe three kinds of problems that can be done using pattern matching.
• Describe the rules for matching a pattern variable.

Java API's:

• Suppose that data items are stored in a HashMap and that the items need to be sorted. How would this be done using the Java libraries?
• Suppose that we would like to sort a set of students, first by age in years, and within the same age, by GPA. How would this be done using the Java libraries?

Hashing:

• How does the Big O of hashing compare with that of AVL trees?
• Describe how hashing with buckets simplifies the code required.

Priority Queues:

• Describe three uses of priority queues.

Sorting:

• What is the Big O of Insertion Sort? Is it stable? In-place? What would be an appropriate use of Insertion Sort, and why?
• Give an advantage and a disadvantage of Merge Sort of an array.

Graphs:

• Give examples of problems whose representations are graphs.
• Depth-first search of a tree is easily done using a recursive function. How is search of a graph different?

MapReduce:

• How do the computer systems on which MapReduce runs differ from ordinary computers?
• Describe how MapReduce provides fault tolerance.

Vocabulary: