Lower Sixth Form boys in Computer Science have been working on their entries for ‘Algorithm of the Month’ whereby they are given a reasonably large and challenging problem and one calendar month to solve it. During the course of the month, they do some research about the problem and write an algorithm in their own code.
The results have shown a fabulous variety of approaches to solutions and the winners so far are:
December
Henry Shaw provided a beautiful solution to convert any number in any base into another base. The solution was so elegant that he gained a commendation for his effort. The algorithm allowed for any alphabet to describe a number base.
January
Alex Ward turned in a great effort at solving two problems: a) how to decide if a polygon created by n points was convex or not; and b) what the minimum distance one had to move each point on the polygon so that all points would fit onto a circle. Alex’s solution has some deep thought processes encoded into it with great use of iteration and recursion.
February
Daniil Dulgeru showed a great deal of determination and endeavour to write an algorithm to find the shortest path from a node in a mathematical graph to any other node in the tree. He wrote his own version of the Dijkstra’s famous ‘Shortest Path Algorithm’ which was accurate and fully functional with nicely abstracted and re-usable code.
This month the boys are investigating numerical methods to solve mathematical equations and have been tasked with writing an algorithm for these.