It's better than COMP20007. The second half of the subject lectures (taught by Nir) are engaging and helpful, however the first half are a bit bland and hard to absorb the information. The textbook is very important, and a pretty easy read. The assignments require a huge amount of work for relatively little grade weight. This semester they tried out a self-grading method where you justify the grades you received, but still had huge delays in mark release for A2&A3 (after we sat the exam). The only way I passed this one was getting theory from the textbook, and having an external tutor teach me the complex stuff and applications (thanks Chiquitta!!!)

The assignments made me question my intelligence as well as my existence. Absolutely do not even consider doing them last minute, as the work required for the time given is immense. This might sound bad - but these assignments, as grueling as they are, are actually among the most interesting, rich and intellectually rewarding projects I've personally worked on until now (2nd year). With only a small amount of guidance, you will need to convert abstract representations of data, such as graphs, into concrete code, completely from scratch. You will need to be creative and logical in thinking about your approach since the first assignment doesn't give you any skeleton code or pre-written algorithms to work with, so you essentially have to come up with most things yourself. Make sure you get used to using pointers, since the assignments live and breathe them. In exchange for the hard assignments, however, the subject is not particularly theory intensive or mathematically challenging - usually a sound "basically, it works like this" level intuition of the algorithms is enough to get by.

Fantastic subject, the lecturer Nir is amazing. The skills you develop in this class not only make u a better engineer, but also help you in getting jobs (coding interviews and such). Highly recommend.

By far the best 2nd year CIS subject ever (better alternative to Design of Algorithms) Goes through all the great algorithms, including path-finding algorithms (unlike DoA which covers hashing and compression instead) For example, the second assignment is usually on path finding and very basic artificial intelligence implementations to solve a 15 puzzle or to even play pacman! Assignments are great fun, and after FoA you should (hopefully) be experienced enough in C to appreciate it. If you're rusty on C don't worry, first few lectures is revision (we recover malloc as well for eng comp kids8) The 2018 Exam question about electrical outages landed me a Graduate offer at EssentialEnergy (ayyyy) I highly recommend this subject over Design of Algorithms if you prefer applications of algorithms over the theory! Students who never had to experience dimefox / nutmeg gonna hate and not appreciate. JupyterLab is so good! (ask the DoA students about their experiences using dimefox and nutmeg trust me)

Good subject, though a bit slow for anyone who's done COMP10002 or VCE Algo. Be careful with the assignments - they are a hurdle and are pretty difficult (DO NOT do them last minute. It hurts.) This semester they introduced JupyterHub which made it a lot easier to do tutes and projects, but I felt a little coddled, because what if I get thrown into the world and don't know linux/unix, ya know? The actual subject content is easy to follow and very logical (and satisfying to learn) but writing in C is a bit of a pain. My only complaint against the subject is that C confuses me. Lol

Nir Lipovetzky is a great lecturer and manages this subject well! Although people might opt for this subject instead of its cognate subject Design of Algorithms, the subject itself isn't necessarily easy! It covers similar depth with Design of Algorithms and students coming from Foundations of Algorithms might feel they have a headstart compared to Engineering Computation students. The assignments were pretty interesting and the final exam was fair! The head tutor, Grady Fitzpatrick is also pretty awesome and very chill. If you happen to enrol in this subject, try to find his tutorial!

Probably one of the best subjects I've taken at uni, although not the easiest. The content is quite interesting with very real applications in industry and general life. The lecturer (Nir) is great, explains concept concisely and with general enthusiasm. The tutors are amazing. There is a discussion forum for posting questions and helping other students, and the head tutor Grady is honestly the greatest man I have never met in person haha. Shoutout to him. The assignments were quite challenging though they were on very interesting concepts. One was building a dictionary of athletes implemented as a binary search tree from a csv file. Everything had to be done from scratch which is why it was quite challenging. The second assignment was much more relaxed and frankly more interesting than the last. You had to implement a path finding algorithm that would solve the 15 puzzle (google if you don't know what it is). It was simpler as code was already given to you, and you'd just have to fill in the blanks. Throughout the subject you learn a lot of algorithms, and it's important you understand these very well. This becomes apparent when you need to analyse given algorithms, finding their time and space complexities. They're not hard to understand, though it might take a few supplementary videos on Youtube to fully grasp their workings, especially some of the more complex ones. Overall this is a very good subject and I'm happy to have taken it!

Lectures are a bit boring, but subject staff and assignments are fun and interesting.