The Big Idea

Hi, I am Tasneem, but most people call me Taz. I am a computer science student at Queens College and this is my very first blog!

I started off my college life in the medical field in which I attended at another college, down the road I switched majors and had a very difficult time understanding the concepts of computer science. In school I was too busy focusing on syntax of a particular language; which in my case was C++ and constantly struggled with text editors such as emacs or vi. It did however peak my interest on file systems of a linux machine. As I gradually progressed throughout the semester I’ve learnt that what matters most when it comes to this field was a keen ability to learn new stuff, and understanding the patterns of algorithms which we can reflect on our programs so that their efficacy is maximized.

We see practical uses of algorithms all the time! Sometimes we don’t even realize it because it is instictual. For example if I were to tell you to look for a “Molly Kauffman” in the yellow books, you wouldn’t simply start your search from the start of the book, nor the end of the book(contingent on the fact that you took elementary classes for alphabets). Normally you’d begin at the middle and then sort your way to the target letter “M”, if you overshot yourself then we look behind and if we undershot our target then we look ahead for a match. This is an example of binary search algorithm which is of a logarithmic time complexity.