Week 8: Voting + HackTX

These weeks are going by so quickly now. Between Senior Design, recruiting events, school, my internship, and life, sleep is something I would probably pay for daily.

This past weekend I participated in HackTX, a hackathon at The University of Texas at Austin. To say the least, it was life-changing! I'm definitely going to write up a full post about it on my other blog so be sure to check it out!

Anyway. You came here to read about CS 313E.

Well, we've switched focus from the first exam to Project 3. I really like this project! It deals with the Australian Voting algorithm. Instead of choosing who their favorite candidate/desired winner is, voters rank all candidates in the order they would want them to win. The two exist cases are 1) if one candidate has more than 50% of the votes, or 2) if all candidates still in the running are tied. In case 1, that candidate is the clear winner and in case 2, all tied candidates are winners. If neither case is achieved, we look at the votes, cut out all candidates tied for the lowest score, and recount their ballots based on their second, third, fourth, and so on choice until we reach one of our exit cases. Our task is to develop and code that algorithm in Python.

We spent the first part of last week discussing Project 3 and the second part discussing Python data structures. Our focus was on 'list', 'deque', and 'linked list'. We went through each data structure and studied the cost/complexity of 1) adding elements to the beginning, middle, and end, 2) removing elements from the beginning, middle, and end, and 3) indexing elements. We also touched a bit on stacks and queues and their respective lifo/fifo functionalities. I'm really interested in learning more details about Python data structures.

Funny Story: When I first saw the word 'deque' (pronounced: deck), I thought it was a misspelling of 'dequeue' (pronounced: dee-cue).

Thanks for reading!
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JL