EBoard 29: Sorting competition

Warning This class is NOT being recorded.

Approximate overview

• Administrivia
• Questions (e.g., on MP7)
• Description of sorting competition
• Sorting competition
• Time for MP7 (?)

Administrivia

• I can’t believe the refillable pens have already started to disappear.

Upcoming Token activities

Academic

• Tuesday, 2023-11-07, Noon, Day PDE: CS Table: Trusting Trust.
• Thursday, 2023-11-09, 11am, JRC 101: Convocation: Grinnell is the Best Fire-trucking College in the World .. and YOU are Ruining It. Come Find Out Why (also Fighting the World’s Fight in a World Gone Mad: A Conversation about Philosophy Politics and Economics in the Modern Age). (David White ‘90).
• Thursday, 2023-11-09, Noon, HSSC 1231 (or Webex). Care in the Academy with Cate Denial. Lunch served (I think; there may be a signup).
• Thursday, 2023-11-09, 4:15pm, Noyce 3821. CS Extras: UIowa.

Cultural

• Wednesday, 2023-11-08, 6-8pm, Bucksbaum 102. The Voice as Instrument: Vocal Exploration and Improvisation with Christine Duncan.
• Saturday, 2023-11-11, Drag.

Peer

Wellness

Misc

• Wednesday, 2023-11-08, 7-8pm, HSSC Kernel (A1231). First-Gen Celebration Day Keynote.
• Wednesday, 2023-11-08, 7-8pm, JRC 209, The Politics of AI spring break tour information session.

Other good things (no tokens)

Upcoming work

• Reading for Wednesday on trees.
• MP7 due Thursday.
• MP7 post-assessment due Friday

Questions

Registration

When will we get the email?

I have no idea.

When will we hear about the game design class?

Round 4, I think.

Do you really need 208/218 for game design?

I believe so.

Lists

Administrative

Sorting

MP7

Rules for the sorting competition

• We pair off people.
• We ask them (their code) to sort N arrays.
  • The size is big enough that the slowest takes more than 200 milliseconds.
  • The arrays can be already sorted, reverse sorted, completely randomized, slightly randomized from sorted, or slightly randomized from reverse sorted.
• We’ll talk about N and the probabilities.
• Please read the code in examples/sorting/SortTools.java
• In the first phase, each person describes their algorithm, how they wrote it, and what they learned.
• The top four or so each earn a token.

What we learned:

• There’s code that tries to find a useful size. It will fail (run too long) on BogoSort.
• It generates the array somewhat randomly (although in sorted order).
• There are at least four different kinds of arrays we might sort.
• There’s a lot of randomness. It feels like BozoSort, inverted.
• The code was structured somewhat clearly with lots of comments
• The code somehow magically works for every sorter: Yay polymorphism.

The competition!

Sam’s adventures with ChatGPT

Time for MP7?