Sunday, November 28, 2010

More office hours news!

I am running late so I'm going to push my office hours to Monday. Since Aaron isn't having office hours, I'll take his time slot (4:00 - 5:30) but in my location: WeH 5205.

Aaron's Office Hours on Nov. 29th

I will not be able to have office hours this week on Monday, Nov. 29th. As always, if you have questions or concerns, please send me an email or post to the discussion board.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Office Hours Today

Because of the break, I will not be having office hours today. Have a nice break! -ankur

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Graphs Grading and Chess Late Days


Many of you had trouble with tests timing out on FrontDesk in the run up to the graphs deadline. This was because the time allowed for each test was conservative, and a large number of tests were being run at the same time. Therefore, in the interest of fairness, we will be manually resubmitting everyone's graphs submissions as we grade them. This means that the tests will be rerun when the system isn't overloaded. Your grade will either not change or go up if your code was unfairly timed out. Since the staff will be doing the submissions, your late day usage will not be affected.

There have also been some questions about how late days will be used on Chess lab. Unlike Graphs, the previous partner assignment, we are allowing you to use up to two of the maximum of your partnership's late days, which is to say

min(2, max(a's late days, b's late days))

For example, if I have no late days, and my partner has five then we can submit our Chess code one or two days late. If, on the other hand, I have 1 late day and my partner has 1 late day, we can only submit one day late.

The deadline for chess is 23:59 on 30 November. That means that if you have two late days to use, you can submit up to 23:59 on 2 December. The competitive pool will remain open until 23:59 on 3 December, which is the last day of the semester. At that time, we will snapshot the leader board and assign extra credit points as described in the handout.

Please note that the code you submit to FrontDesk is the only code that we'll use to assign testing and style points. If you choose to continue hacking on your chess AI beyond the formal deadline, that's up to you, but it will only count towards your standings in the competition.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Chess signups

The list of andrewids we were using was out-of-date. We've updated it now. So, everyone should be able to sign up at http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/211/sign-up.html now.

Chess

Chess lab has been released. You may now sign up with your andrew id at http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/211/sign-up.html You can http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/211/chess-results.html Please read the documentation on Frontdesk in its entirety before starting the assignment! There is no theory component. The unit tested component is due on Nov 30. You may use late days for the unit tested part of the lab. The pool will close on Dec 2. You may not use late days for the pool. Have fun!

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Extra-Special Office Hours

I will be holding extra office hours from 1:30 - 3:00pm tomorrow to help answer any lingering questions on Graphs lab. I'll be at the 6th floor couches of Wean.
Jonathan

MST-TSP Approximation Clarification

We've been getting lots of questions about this part of the lab; this is mostly our fault, as the documentation is unclear and possibly misleading.
Some clarifications:
1) When you are completing the graph, connect every two vertices with an edge whose weight is the shortest path between them (even if the vertices are adjacent, this may not be the shortest path)
2) Once you've gotten the order to visit the tour in, you should walk along the "edges" (i.e. shortest paths) in the MST to get from one vertex to another
3) Your tour should end with the start vertex, and shouldn't start with it.
Note that clarifications 1 and 2 aren't the only way to produce a "valid" tour (one that meets the spec), but hopefully explaining it this way makes it easier to understand and implement.
We are very sorry that this part of the assignment wasn't explained as well as it should have been.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Midterm grades released

The grades for the 2nd midterm have been released. The min,max,mean, median were 19.5, 69.5, 53, and 54 points, respectively, out of a total of 72 possible points. Your TA will return your exam tomorrow during recitation.

Monday, November 01, 2010

Graph Theory Corrections

Based on a few questions that keep coming up, here are a list of clarifications for the theory assignment:
Question 1: The theorem is intentionally wrong. We aren't asking for a counterexample, we are asking you to find the flaw in the proof.
Question 3b: Just like in part a, you are allowed to manipulate the graph.
I'll update this list if more things come up.