Week 51 (1/21/2026 - 1/27/2026)

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    Hi everyone, welcome to my 51st blog! This is the Week 3 post for CST 370 Design and Analysis of Algorithms.
  • Weekly learning journal relevant to this week's module. (50 words)
    • Unlike the first two weeks, this is the first week that I feel introduced mostly new concepts that I had not picked up from my community college data structures and algorithms course. One example of this is Depth and Breadth First Search (DFS, BFS) algorithms. In this class, we have been heavily applying these search algorithms to the graph data structure. However, in my previous data structure course, I learned how these algorithms were applied to a Binary Search Tree (BST) and AVL Tree instead of graphs. Other algorithms such as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) were newly introduced to me by this course.
    • There was also a homework assignment this week that tasked me to write two programs:
      • 1. Given an input representing an unweighted undirected graph, run Depth First Search (DFS). 
        • The pseudocode provided in the instructions helped make this implementation much easier.
      • 2. Given an input representing a weighted graph, run Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) to find the most optimal path; in other words, path of lowest cost. 
        • For this assignment, I felt AI-assisted programming was quite effective in helping me truly understand how this algorithm works. Since AI usage is somewhat encouraged in this class, I applied it here. While I still believe AI has a good reason to be generally frowned upon in education, there is no denying that sometimes it can be a very useful and powerful tool, especially in this day and age. It was evident when working with AI through this particular algorithm. The shift toward agentic programming is also happening in the real world, where software engineering is evolving more into a software architect role; someone who must understand how things go together but not required to write every line of code.
    • Finally, I also contributed this video to our course's official Discord server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL1t1WbdMZw. It highlights the trials and tributations of utilizing ChatGPT to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) at a time Learning Language Models (LLMs) were more primitive compared to today: July 2023.

    That is all for this week, see you in my Week 52 post!

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