Thread: Practice Questions / Problems / Projects

You can try Top Coder. It's algorithm intensive, though. The premise of the site is to come up with the most efficient algorithm possible given a story problem. Solving the problems are usually quite easy, but coming up with the most points is extremely difficult.

You can also try re-creating your favorite board/card games in java. (note: AI can be sort of a pain for some games)

Learning about algorithms/data structures is a very useful thing (albeit, quite tedious sometimes).

Here are some very useful algorithms/data structures you could try implementing (just search for them on wikipedia) in no particular order:

1. Merge Sort
2. Quick Sort
2a. Quick select
3. Insertion Sort
3a. Shell sort
4. Heaps and Heap sort
5. Hash tables
6. Trees
6a. Binary search trees
6b. Tree traversal: Prefix (left-right-node)
6c. Tree traversal: infix (left-node-right)
6d. Tree traversal: in-order (node-left-right)
7. Dijkstra's pathfinding algorithm
7a. A* pathfinding (this website is better for learning A*: A* tutorial. Note: it does use C for their code, but the ideas are much easier to understand here)
8. Queues
8a. Priority queues
9. Stacks
11. Graphs

I think that's most of the basic algorithms and data structures that you will find useful (there might be others)

i have a problem if anyone would like to take a shot at.

i have a set of answers to a test. i need to have a program calculate students answers against the answers. each correct answer is 2 points, each wrong anser is - 1 point, and no answer gets 0 points. the output needs to return the student ID, then the answers, next should be the test score, and last should be the test grade. grading scale of A thru F.i use netbeans to do this program. the ansers are true and false. T F F T F F T T T T F F T F T F T F T T. the first students ID and answers are ABC54301 T F T F T F T T T F T F T F F T T F T. the blank means he did not answer that question. please let me know what you think.