Week 10: Sort of an Assignment Week

With the week of regular expressions coming to a close, assignment two ignited sparks in our recursive mindsets as we were given the sample code and were required to complete various methods involving regular expression trees. Most of these functions we were required to complete we were able to solve using our toolkits packed with knowledge involving recursion and linked tree lists that we have been constantly adding under out belts as programmers. During the lectures we were introduced to the topic of sorting algorithms, the basics involving their steps, run-times as well as the many perks and flaws among them. Many sorting algorithms involving various steps which may run differently on different computers which have different quantities of memory. This week we were introduced to an effective notation to dictate the general run-time on all machines such that the run-time would be relative to the number of elements n rather than the amount of cores, memory and RAM your machine has. This notation is called big O notation and by learning this notation, we are able to accurately predict the average changes in run-time when changing the amount of elements when sorting using various algorithms.