Bifalgorithm post

What is your major here at MIT? Computer Science. Do you think you can answer five questions every comp science major should know? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to ask you five questions. Each one will get harder if you get it right. What is recursion and what is a base case? Recursion is where you, in a function, you call the function over and over again. Base case is where you terminate. Yeah, good job. One for one. What is a hash table and what makes it efficient? A hash table maps one element to another. It uses a . It maps keys to values using a hash function. Yeah, perfect. Two for two. What is the difference between breadth-first search and depth-first search? BFS means you kind of like check all paths at the same time. DFS, you check one path at a time, basically. Okay, they seem pretty easy for you. I'm going to give you some harder ones. Three for three. What is a convolutional neural network, and why is it effective for image recognition? A convolutional neural network takes in inputs. I think they call it tensors. You kind of transform it. Using what they call it convolutions, you have non-linear functions at the very end. They're effective for image recognition because you're not really focused on one particular pixel but pixels relative to each other. Perfect, 4 for 4. This is the hardest one. What is the difference between NP-hard and NP-complete problems? NP-complete problems are problems that are both in NP and NP-hard. NP-hard is just NP-hard. NP-hard encapsulates NP-complete. Yeah, good job. Five for five. And why are you studying computer science? I don't know. For fun. And what do you want to get into after you graduate? I don't know. Food truck. There you go. Have a good one, bro.

What is your major here at MIT? Computer Science. Do you think you can answer five questions every comp science major should know? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to ask…