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Aaron Trevena wrote: > > I can't believe that they didn't teach a single algorithm on my course > at uni, possibly they expected us to teach ourselves algorithms, but > there wasn't even a 'start/look here' or mention of them on our > course. Hehe, surely Knuth TAOCP should be compulsory on all computing courses, if only for the dry humour. I did applied maths and theoretical physics, and whilst I don't recall anything on the course description mentioning algorithms we were taught loads (in many cases by one of the GLUG members!), and some basic stuff on comparing them. Although it is revealing in itself that some of those algorithms were more concerned with minimising memory usage, than with computational efficiency. My age is showing. My day to day experience has been most of the methods one needs, hashes, sorting (rarely), indexing (whenever one can avoid a sort) etc, have already been implemented in libraries, so mostly one just needs to know that they exist, and when to use these techniques, not necessary how to do them. Indeed I'm usually far more interested when coding in whether a sort is stable, say, than whether it is the most efficient possible (which often depends on ordering in the data anyway). At the Met Office, and in similar places, where such algorithms are often needed in novel, or super efficient forms, the folks doing them are serious mathematicians (i.e. my poor graduate brain just went wobble looking at them).
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