What is happening in Advanced Algorithms Honors course?

If you walk into our advanced algorithms class, you might be greeted by students playing the Rubik’s cube, assembling a (small) self-driving car, and maybe even playing on a chess board with 8 queens! What do all these have to do with algorithms?

“We use these fun and hands-on problems to motivate the use of advanced algorithms” says Dr. Baharav. “These algorithms are usually studied in depth as a second or third semester college course. At Kehillah, we introduce the concepts in this advanced class, and explore them by hands on programming.”

Consider the 8-queens problem as an example. We found two solution on a real physical board, and then developed an algorithm to find all 92 possible solutions. This algorithm was then extended to 10 queens on a 10×10 board, and beyond. From there, we moved to solving shortest path problems, followed by solving a maze, and our next challenge is a sudoku. Through these we covered enumeration, Breadth first, and Depth first algorithms.

The self-driving car is a parallel effort to introduce image processing algorithms in a friendly and practical way.  The goal is to build a self-driving car capable of roaming Kehillah’s hallways.

So what about the Rubik’s cubes you ask? To start with, they are fun. But on a more serious note, we will revisit these later on this year, and talk about developing a language to characterize and solve these. “My plan is to solve the cube in less than 47 seconds!” says Ben Lipman, A senior student in the course. And in that, he refers to solving it by hand. Hopefully the algorithm will do it much faster.