The Importance of Trees

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来自 Rice University 的课程

Principles of Computing (Part 2)

235 个评分

Rice University

Principles of Computing (Part 2)

235 个评分

课程 4（共 7 门，Specialization Fundamentals of Computing）

This two-part course introduces the basic mathematical and programming principles that underlie much of Computer Science. Understanding these principles is crucial to the process of creating efficient and well-structured solutions for computational problems. To get hands-on experience working with these concepts, we will use the Python programming language. The main focus of the class will be weekly mini-projects that build upon the mathematical and programming principles that are taught in the class. To keep the class fun and engaging, many of the projects will involve working with strategy-based games. In part 2 of this course, the programming portion of the class will focus on concepts such as recursion, assertions, and invariants. The mathematical portion of the class will focus on searching, sorting, and recursive data structures. Upon completing this course, you will have a solid foundation in the principles of computation and programming. This will prepare you for the next course in the specialization, which will begin to introduce a structured approach to developing and analyzing algorithms. Developing such algorithmic thinking skills will be critical to writing large scale software and solving real world computational problems.

从本节课中

Trees

This week, we will explain the importance of trees. We will also explore how to set up game trees so that we can efficiently search them.

The Importance of Trees 2:21

Illustration of Trees 7:17

与讲师见面

Scott Rixner
Professor
Computer Science
Joe Warren
Professor
Computer Science
Luay Nakhleh
Associate Professor
Computer Science; Biochemistry and Cell Biology

[MUSIC]

This week we're going to talk about trees.

No, not the kind that grow in the

ground, but rather trees from a computer science perspective.

They kind of look like this.

>> Wow Scott, you really spent a lot of money on that didn't you there.

[LAUGH] >> I broke the bank.

[LAUGH] Okay.

Trees get used all over the place

in computer science, they have numerous applications.

Roy, you want to give us some information on one?

Sure, I my research area is in computation of biology and we look at threes in

biology because over 150 years ago Charles Darwin

sketched a tree in his, book Origin of Species.

What he depicted how species evolve and diversify and diverge from each other.

And ever since, trees have been a main model in biology

that depict how genes proteins and, and, and species evolve and diversify.

>> Let's go back to our expensive picture here.

Dwight can you help me hold that up?

Joe, you want to explain why trees are interesting?

>> Yeah, so we, we just talked about recursion.

So trees are really a very nice example of a recursive data structure.

So say here we have a tree, it has a root.

It has two children who themselves are sub trees.

And we can just simply apply that definition over and over.

Here we have this tree.

It has a root.

It has two subtrees, this has two sub, has a subtree and so forth.

In fact, the only thing that really bothers me about this diagram is

somehow that, while the root's up here and, what's going on back here Roy?

What's the problem?

The root is at the bottom, actually.

>> We need to get grounds keeping to fix this immediately.

[LAUGH].

>> Yeah, we've had some problems with our trees here on campus.

Okay, so trees are interesting for a variety of reasons.

And so this week we're going to investigate trees and recursion.

We've already told you that recursion is a powerful technique in computer science.

When we combine that with recursive data structures it becomes even more

interesting, because recursion is a natural

way of processing these data structures.

And we're not going to talk about, genetic trees

here this week, rather, we're going to game trees.

So we're going to think about, how do you play a game?

And how do you represent it as a tree, where you start with the

current state of the game and there are many possible moves you can make.

And that moves the game say to a different, level of the tree.

And then once you're here you can make more moves, and move down, and so on.

And then you search the tree to find the best set of moves that you can make.

This week we're going to use these trees to apply them to

games, but there are a lot of other applications that we can use.

And hopefully you'll get an insight as to why trees are interesting

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