CST 370 Week 5

This week I learned a little bit more about binary trees and Quick Sort. These are concepts I was already somewhat familiar with from previous classes, but it was nice to get a refresher and reinforce what I had learned before. Going through the examples again helped me better understand how binary trees are structured and how Quick Sort partitions an array before recursively sorting each side. Even though I had seen these topics before, I still picked up on a few details that I either forgot or did not fully understand the first time.

Some things I did learn that I had never seen before were Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and topological sorting. I know there are many different types of graphs and sorting algorithms, so it was fun to be introduced to something new. Learning when a topological sort can be used and why DAGs cannot contain cycles was interesting because it showed another practical way graphs can model real-world problems. Kahn's algorithm was also very fascinating to learn. It was interesting to see how repeatedly removing vertices with no incoming edges can produce a valid ordering. Overall, I enjoyed this week's material because it balanced reviewing familiar concepts while introducing new ones, and I am looking forward to learning how these topics will connect with future algorithms.