Base.cs Podcast

In this episode, we get into parse trees, an illustrated, pictorial version of the grammatical structure of a sentence, which is important to understanding how computers understand coding syntax. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Grammatically Rooting Oneself With Parse Trees".

We continue our journey with the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), where this we imagine a salesperson has to travel to every single city in an area, visiting each city only once. Additionally, they need to end up in the same city where they starts their journey from, and do this in the most efficient manner. However, in this episode, we are going to speed our salesperson up by using a bottom-up approach! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "The Trials And Tribulations Of The Traveling Salesman".

We start our season off with something that often pops up in technical interviews: the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). In this problem, a salesperson has to travel to every single city in an area, visiting each city only once. Additionally, they need to end up in the same city where they starts their journey from. Find out how to make our salesperson do this in the most efficient way possible! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "The Trials And Tribulations Of The Traveling Salesman".

In this last episode of the season we continue our discussion of dynamic programming, and show just how efficient it can be by using the Fibonacci sequence! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Less Repetition, More Dynamic Programming".

In this episode we talk about different paradigms and approaches to algorithmic design: the Divide and Conquer Algorithm, the Greedy Algorithm, and the Dynamic Programming Algorithm, which remembers the subproblems that it has seen and solved before so as not to repeat doing the same thing over again. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Less Repetition, More Dynamic Programming".

We continue our talk about Dijkstra's algorithm, which can be used to determine the shortest path from one node in a graph to every other node within the same graph data structure, provided that the nodes are reachable from the starting node. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Finding The Shortest Path, With A Little Help From Dijkstra".

In this episode, we talk about Dijkstra's algorithm, which can be used to determine the shortest path from one node in a graph to every other node within the same graph data structure, provided that the nodes are reachable from the starting node. It's super important, and you'll see why when you learn about the weighted graph! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Finding The Shortest Path, With A Little Help From Dijkstra".

We end our section of the DFS algorithm with a discussion on DAGs (directed acyclic graphs), because most implementations of depth-first search will check to see if any cycles exist, and a large part of that is based on the DFS algorithm checking to see whether or not a graph is a directed acyclic graph. DAGs are also somewhat infamous in computer science because they’re pretty much everywhere in sofware. For example, a directed acyclic graph is the backbone of applications that handle scheduling for systems of tasks or handling jobs — especially those that need to be processed in a particular order. So let's dig into DAGs! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Spinning Around In Cycles With Directed Acyclic Graphs".

Throughout our exploration of graphs, we’ve focused mostly on representing graphs, and how to search through them. We also learned about edges, the elements that connect the nodes in a graph. In this episode, we look at the different classifications of edges and how, in the context of a graph, edges can be more than just “directed” or “undirected”. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Spinning Around In Cycles With Directed Acyclic Graphs".

Last episode, we talked about traversing through a graph with the depth-first search (DFS) algorithm, which helps us determine one (of sometimes many) paths between two nodes in the graph by traversing down one single path until we can't go any further, checking one child node at a time. Now we talk about how you code BFS and what tools might you use. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Deep Dive Through A Graph: DFS Traversal".

We ended last season by starting our discussion of searching, or traversing, through a graph with breadth-first search (BFS). The breadth-first search algorithm traverses broadly into a structure, by visiting neighboring sibling nodes before visiting children nodes. Now we begin our new season with depth-first search (DFS), which also helps us determine one (of sometimes many) paths between two nodes in the graph, but this time by traversing down one single path in a graph, until we can't go any further, checking one child node at a time. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Deep Dive Through A Graph: DFS Traversal".

In this episode, we start our discussion of searching, or traversing, through a graph with breadth-first search (BFS). The breadth-first search algorithm traverses broadly into a structure, by visiting neighboring sibling nodes before visiting children nodes. The power of using breadth-first search to traverse through a graph is that it can easily tell us the shortest way to get from one node to another, which you'll experience first hand by brining muffins to your neighbors! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Going Broad In A Graph: BFS Traversal".

In this episode, we continue our discussion of representing graphs with adjacency lists -- a hybrid between an edge list and an adjacency matrix, which we learned about last episode! They are also the most popular and commonly-used representation of a graph. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "From Theory To Practice: Representing Graphs".

Graphs come from mathematics, and are nothing more than a way to formally represent a network, which is a collection of objects that are all interconnected (this is all stuff you should already know if you have been religiously listening to this podcast, which you should be). Now we're going from theory to practice and talking about how to represent graphs. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "From Theory To Practice: Representing Graphs".

In last episode, we talked about 2-3 trees, where the nodes of every tree contain data in the form of keys, as well as potential child nodes, and can contain more than one key. This takes us to b-trees, which is a generalized version of the 2-3 tree, and are super efficient for storing data in an indexed database, like MySQL. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Busying Oneself With B-Trees".