CSE 373 - Analysis of Algorithms
Fall 2026
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Course Time: 2:00PM - 3:20PM Tuesday-Thursday
Place: Engineering 145 - Steven Skiena's office hours are 12:30PM-3:20PM Tuesday-Thursday, and by appointment. You can also catch me right after class.
- The course bulletin board will be Piazza. Sign up by clicking here.
Lecture Notes
- Lecture notes from current semester.
- Video and audio lectures with links to lecture notes from previous offerings of my course are available at my YouTube channel or http://www.cs.stonybrook.edu/~skiena/373/videos/. The associated lecture notes from these old offerings are available here.
- There is a Wiki with possible solutions to odd numbered problems from the book.
- Adam Conrad wrote an extensive set of blog posts based on auditing my algorithms course via video. These notes include Javascript implementations of algorithms and might be helpful to those learning the material.
Course Documents
- Course Syllabus and lecture schedule in pdf format.
- Daily Homework Problems in pdf format.
- A list of hard problems suitable to challenge me on.
Homework Assignments
- Homework 1 - DUE 9/15/26 in pdf format.
- Homework 2 - DUE 10/1/26 in pdf format.
- Midterm 1 will be held Thursday, September 24 and will cover big oh, data structures, and sorting. I have posted a copy of a prior year's Midterm 1 to help you study. Note: we will not provide an answer key, especially for the multiple choice problems, to encourage you to work them out on your own.
- Homework 3 - DUE 10/22/26 in pdf format. The four testfiles for Homework 3 are file 1, file 2, file 3, file 4. The first number represents the number of edges, the second the number of vertices, and each subsequent line represents an edge between the pair of numbered vertices.
- Homework 4 - DUE 11/5/26 in pdf format. Test your program on our collection of datasets for HW4.
- Midterm 2 will be held Tuesday, November 17 and will cover graph algorithms, backtracking, and dynamic programming. I have posted a copy of a prior year's Midterm 2 to help you study. Note: we will not provide an answer key, especially for the multiple choice problems, to encourage you to work them out on your own.
- Homework 5 - DUE 12/3/26 in pdf. Try to do the dynamic programming problems before the midterm.
Related Links
- A picture of the highest degree node in the road network that I am aware of. A competing claim from New Delhi, India connects 12 roads through a hexagonal structure, but I need to see the park paved before I will accept it. Dupont Circle in Washington DC appears to have degree 10 to 13, depending on whether a divided two-way road counts as 1 or 2 edges. But the circle needs to be paved over in any case. Paris is a city of circles with many connections, like the Arc de Triomphe. It also contains nodes of degree at least seven.
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The third edition of The Algorithm Design Manual
is now available!
- The course textbook as the way to get a job at Google
- Check out this comprehensive collection of algorithm animations from Steve Halim at the National University of Singapore.
- Videos of sorting algorithms as folk dances.
is now available!
Extra Credit
Interested students may attempt the following extra credit programming challenges from Skiena/Revilla for a small amount of additional points -- small enough that you should be motivated primarily by interest and not greed.You can submit these problems through the UVA Online Judge. I have given the corresponding UVA Judge number for each problem in parentheses. Google "
A schedule for doing these problems that is somewhat consistant with this course is:
- week 1: 110101 3n+1 (100)
- week 2: 110201 Jolly Jumpers (10038)
- week 3: 110303 Common Permutation (10252)
- week 4: 110401 Vito's family (10041)
- week 5: 110405 Shoemakers problem (10026)
- week 6: 111101 Is Bigger Smarter? (10131)
- week 7: 111104 Unidirectional TSP (116)
- week 8: 110801 Little Bishops (861)
- week 9: 110901 Bicoloring (10004)
- week 10: 110902 Playing with Wheels (10067)
- week 11: 111006 Tourist Guide (10099)
- week 12: 111105 Cutting Sticks (10003)
- week 13: 110806 Garden of Eden (10001)
- week 14: 111005 War (10158)
- week 15: 110805 Tug of War (10032)
Send me all your work at the end of the semester to receive credit.
Objectives
Read about the CS accreditation ABET program. The ABET objectives for the course are
- Provide a rigorous introduction to worst-case asymptotic algorithm analysis.
- Develop classical graph and combinatorial algorithms for such problems as sorting, shortest paths and minimum spanning trees.
- Introduce the concept of computational intractability and NP completeness.
The course will also satisfy the following program objective:
- (S6) have a solid understanding of computational theory and foundational mathematics.
Professor
Steven S. Skiena 251 New Computer Science Building Department of Computer Science State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-2424, USA skiena@cs.stonybrook.edu 631-632-9026
Join the Stony Brook Computer Science Society