Angus Macdonald

This year marked the first time I’d tutored on a second year course, Foundations of Computation. Of the topics covered I produced notes and code to help explain lists, search algorithms, and trees. I’ve included them below in the hope they may be useful.

Algorithms for finding cycles in Linked Lists (GitHub repository). The included code runs various algorithms to find cycles, and graphs the efficiency of each algorithm.

Search Algorithms Comparison (GitHub repository). The included code implements three search algorithms (Selection, Insertion, and Merge Sort) and includes various levels of debug to show the process taken by each algorithm and to count the number of comparisons and swaps involved.

Cheat sheet for Balancing AVL Trees (Google Docs). A very brief guide explaining what operations must be performed to balance and AVL tree.

I recently gave a talk to our Masters Databases class entitled Current Trends in Distributed Database Systems.

The talk (available here) covers some of the more innovative designs in database systems over the last few years, from Vertica and VoltDB, to larger-scale datastores such as Amazon’s Dynamo.

Major aside: I tried and failed to come up with a more entertaining title for the talk. The suggestions I received on twitter were better, but less relevant (one of the suggestions is on my title slide).

So, if you think you can do better and come up with something that is both relevant and witty/entertaining, there’ll be some form of prize in it for you!