Concept Challenge: Performance of DFS and BFS

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Do curso por University of California San Diego

Advanced Data Structures in Java

890 ratings

University of California San Diego

Advanced Data Structures in Java

890 ratings

Curso 3 de 5 em Specialization Programação Java: Design Orientado a Objetos de Estruturas de Dados

How does Google Maps plan the best route for getting around town given current traffic conditions? How does an internet router forward packets of network traffic to minimize delay? How does an aid group allocate resources to its affiliated local partners? To solve such problems, we first represent the key pieces of data in a complex data structure. In this course, you’ll learn about data structures, like graphs, that are fundamental for working with structured real world data. You will develop, implement, and analyze algorithms for working with this data to solve real world problems. In addition, as the programs you develop in this course become more complex, we’ll examine what makes for good code and class hierarchy design so that you can not only write correct code, but also share it with other people and maintain it in the future. The backbone project in this course will be a route planning application. You will apply the concepts from each Module directly to building an application that allows an autonomous agent (or a human driver!) to navigate its environment. And as usual we have our different video series to help tie the content back to its importance in the real world and to provide tiered levels of support to meet your personal needs.

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Class design and simple graph search

This week you'll get the backbone of your map search engine up and running. In previous courses, including the previous courses in this specialization, you've probably been given most of the classes you needed to complete the assignments. But learning how to design classes from scratch is a key skill that you will need as you become a more sophisticated Java programmer. This week we'll give you the tools you need to create a robust and elegant class design for your map search engine. We'll introduce a similar problem and show you how it can be represented as a graph. Then we'll introduce two core search algorithms: depth-first search and breadth-first search. Finally, we'll turn our graph problem into a set of Java classes. Your task on the programming assignment this week will be to do the same thing, but in the context on the map search engine!

Core: Intro to Class Design4:48

When I struggled: Building useful classes1:03

In the Real World: Design patterns1:19

Core: DFS, Part 16:14

Core: DFS, Part 24:39

Support: Developing Small Examples to Test Your Code6:40

When I struggled: Data structures jargon1:06

When I struggled: The right data structure for the job1:17

Concept Challenge: Performance of DFS and BFS5:58

Conheça os instrutores

Leo Porter
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Mia Minnes
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Christine Alvarado
Associate Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

All right, now that we've talked about depth for search and breadth for search,

we're ready to probe our understanding of these concepts with the concept challenge.

And so as you might remember with these concept challenge,

we invite you to pause and try to solve a problem yourself.

Then discuss with other learners around you if you can.

Watch the UC San Diego learners discuss the same problem.

Try the question again, perhaps with a little bit more confidence, and

then confirm your understanding as we come back together and

explain some of the key concepts involved.

So for this problem what we'd like to do is think about comparing these two

algorithms we have for graph search, namely depth first search and

breadth first search.

And as you remember from the core videos that Christina presented,

these algorithms as pseudocode are very, very similar, but what's really

distinguishing them in terms of just the code is the basic data structure that we

use in order to keep track of what we've visited and what we still need to do.

But what we'll see is how this impacts performance.

And so the question I invite you to think about is which algorithm, depth first

search, breadth first search, is asymptotically faster in the worst case?

And so when you're answering this question think about the asymptotic

notation that we've talked about in the previous courses with big-O analysis.

>> Hi, I am Unger.

>> Hi, I'm Kevin.

Hi, I'm Annie.

>> So, I think that depth first search would be

better because, let's say there's a graph and

it's very deep but it's not broad enough.

So if I have to find the path from the road to,

at the very end, then I can directly reach depth first search.

So think that depth first search would be faster.

>> Okay, but what about breadth first search in which there's a lot of nodes and

they're really spread out.

Wouldn't breath first search be faster in that scenario?

>> Well I think just looking at the code for breadth first search and

depth first search, it all looks pretty similar.

I mean, it looks like the only difference is that depth first search uses a stack

data structure and breadth first search uses a queue.

And I guess from what you were saying it just depends on what

the worst case actually is, right?

So what is the worst case?

>> So let's say the two nodes are not connected and

we are trying to find the path and then I think that would be the worst case.

>> Yeah, so in such case it looks like,

since we would have to visit every single node that's unvisited in the graph,

then wouldn't it be very similar in terms of run time?

>> Yeah, so- >> I agree

>> All right,

now let's think through this question together.

Let's think about, in particular, what the worst case analysis should look like.

And so we have to think about what our algorithm will do and

in the very worst case.

So worst case in when we have to do the most work.

And we can think about starting, and then we have to visit more and

more and more nodes.

And we'd like to get to the goal, and when will that happen in the worst case?

Well it's when we've explored everything else that was possible and

we've gone through all the dead ends that we had and

we still need to keep on going further until we get to the goal.

And so if we think about how many nodes we have to visit until we get to the goal,

in the worst case we're gonna have to visit

every single one of the nodes before we get to the goal.

And so the number of nodes in each one of these algorithms we'll visit will be

size of the vertex set minus one, which is order the size of the vertex set.

Now, is that it?

Is that just the run time that we have to think about?

And when we think back to the algorithm, in either case we definitely

do something for every node that we visit, but we also as part of our algorithm

have to keep track of the edges that are possible to us from that particular

node that we are visiting or that we are exploring at that particular moment.

And so what we end up doing is doing some work for each of the current node's

unvisited neighbors, which means going through all possible edges.

And so not only do we have to think about which nodes are visited,

we also have to think about which edges are traversed by this algorithm.

And in the worst case we traverse every single one of them.

And so taking the fact that we have to do some constant amount of work for

traversing each edge in the graph, we see that our run time will have a contribution

that corresponds to O of the number of edges in the graph as well.

And so putting that together, the worst case run time for

both depth first search and breadth first search is gonna be O of

the number of vertices plus the number of edges.

Now you might stop there and say, well hold on a second.

I know my asymptotics and I know that if the number of edges is

square of the number of vertices, that's going to be the dominant term,

the number of edges might be the dominant term.

And I can just drop the number of vertices and

say, worst case running time is just O of the number of edges.

It's useful to us in our analysis of an algorithm to keep apart this notion of

the number of vertices, the number of edges, how they impact performance, and

that way we can tune our analysis to the actual graphs that we're working with.

So for example, in the graph that you're working with for the project,

you might notice that the number of edges that we have isn't anywhere near quadratic

in the the number of vertices, it's really linear in the number of vertices.

And so in that situation, the performance that we have for depth first search and

breadth first search is really going to be linear in the size of the graph

rather than quadratic.

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