Day 3: Exploring Advanced Topics

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• Artificial Intelligence
• Concurrent Programming

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Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is an area of computer science which studies how a computer performs an activity which is currently performed better by a human. Diagnosing diseases or driving a car are examples of activities a human can (currently) perform better than a computer. You will investigate how to simulate intelligent behavior in a computer and write computer programs to play a game, such as tic-tac-toe, or solve a puzzle, such as sudoku.

Sudoku

There are several algorithms for finding solutions to Sudoku puzzles. Today, we will explore the simplest algorithm which uses a stack.

As a group, develop the algorithm for solving Sudoku puzzles.

Resources

• A Demo (to run, download and double-click)
• Use the provided skeleton NetBeans project: Sudoku Skeleton
• Sample puzzles which can be used as input (from Web Sudoku)
  • Easy
  • Medium
  • Hard
  • Evil
• Web Sudoku (a source of new puzzles)
• Sudoku (Wikipedia)
• Sample solution

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Concurrent Programming

With the advent of multi-core processors on the desktop, concurrent programming, which involves writing programs which perform more than one activity at once by dispatching each activity to a different processor, is an essential ingredient in the development of modern computer programs. For instance, Google's new Chrome web browser is a concurrent program in that all open tabs in the browser run in parallel. Moreover, concurrent programs can model many real-world situations such as multiple customers in a food court dynamically entering and exiting the various queues therein. Specifically, you will implement i) finding prime numbers and ii) sorting - specifically merge sort.

Prime Number Exercise

Steps:

1. Write a program to check if a given number is prime.
2. Write a program to identify all the prime numbers up to a certain point.
3. Write a program to simultaneously check multiple numbers for primality, identifying all the prime numbers up to a certain point.

For text-based I/O, use MainPrime.java for step 1 and MainRange.java for steps 2 and 3.

Refer to the concurrency thread through the Java tutorial for information on using threads in Java.

Merge sort

Steps:

1. Sort 10 numbers on paper by tracing through the merge sort algorithm.
2. Implement merge sort.
3. Implement merge sort using threads.

For text-based I/O, use MainMerge.java.

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