Solving Hard Problems in Practice

0-0.5 Course Units

What does Sudoku have in common with debugging, scheduling exams, and routing shipments? All of these problems are provably hard -- no one has a fast algorithm to solve them. But in reality, people are quickly solving these problems on a huge scale with clever systems and heuristics! In this course, we'll explore how researchers and organizations like Microsoft, Google, and NASA are solving these hard problems, and we'll get to use some of the tools they've built! Not Offered Every Year Prerequisites: Students must take CIS 1210 before taking CIS 1921. 0-0.5 Course Units