600.226: Data Structures

Spring Semester 2006: January 30, 2006 - May 5, 2006

Assignment 9: Whispering Trees

Out on: April 7, 2006
Due by: April 14, 2006 by 5:59 pm for full credit (11:59 pm for 10% off, hard deadline)
Collaboration: Pairs
Grading: Packaging 10%, Style 10%, Performance 30%, Design 10%, Functionality 40%

Overview

The ninth assignment for 600.226: Data Structures deals mostly with ordered maps of one sort or another. There are some "written" problems as well, to be answered in the README file.

Note that each pair hands in one assignment! Decide early on who is going to be responsible for submitting the assignment and when. Make sure to include all the relevant information (who is in the pair?) in your README file! Both of you will get the same score for the assignment.

Here are the necessary interfaces and exception classes: omaps.tar.gz As usual, you are not allowed to change the code we provide in any way! Warning: This is a new version of the assignment and there may be serious bugs in these interfaces. If you think you found a bug, please email the course staff about it immediately. Thanks!

Problem 1: Basic Binary Search Trees

Your first task is to write a class SimpleOrderedMap<K,V> that implements the OrderedMap<K,V> interface we provided above. This class should use basic binary search trees to implement the OrderedMap<K,V> operations, so no fancy "balancing acts" are allowed.

Please don't use existing Java data structures for this, write the tree code from scratch and implement in terms of a "linked" representation with separate Node objects that hold Entries consisting of keys and values. Your Node and Entry classes should be nested inside your SimpleOrderedMap<K,V> class. Try to make your code as simple as possible: it's more important to have a correct implementation for reference than to have the fastest possible implementation; performance is addressed in the second problem below.

As usual, please provide a toString() method to return a String representation of the map, and a main() method that performs basic unit testing for your implementation. A new map into which the pairs ("Peter", 35), ("Hans", 70), and ("Toni", 67) were inserted should print as {Hans: 70, Peter: 35, Toni: 67}; the order has to follow the order defined for the keys you are using.

Problem 2: Balanced Search Trees

Your second task is to write an efficient implementation of the OrderedMap<K,V> interface using some kind of balanced search tree. The exact data structure used for your BalancedOrderedMap<K,V> is up to you (as long as you select from the following list anyway). There are a number of options, and you may want to consider them a bit before committing to one or the other; you might even decide to change things after you see how your first prototype performs. Here are your options:

Once again, the exact choices are up to you, so you can determine the amount of work you do pretty flexibly. However, please keep in mind that we emphasize performance more than in previous assignments (check the rubric above) so it is in your best interest to make choices that will result in the best possible performance under the widest variety of conditions.

As usual, please provide a toString() method to return a String representation of the map (see Problem 1 for the format). In fact, given that balanced search trees are pretty complicated beasts, you may want to add another operation to generate DOT code; this will allow you to "visually debug" your data structure fairly easily. Also, you should again provide a suitable main() method for testing.

Please describe the test method you chose, the alternate implementations you provide (if any), and the results of your performance comparison (if any) in your README file.

Problem 3: Analyzing Speech

This problem is identical to last week's Problem 3, except for the changes in bold toward the end.

A simple way to get an idea of what a certain text is about is to count how often certain words appear in it. Your final task for this assignment is to write a program WordFreq (based on your Map implementations) that performs this kind of analysis.

Your program should accept input text (in plain ASCII format) from standard input and produce a list of the 32 most frequently occurring words on the standard output; for each word, the number of times it appeared should be given as well. Consider the command java WordFreq <in.txt >out.txt. If in.txt contains

Bla bla, balla bla. Balla balla bla
bla bla blue balla bla balla bla.

bla!!

          -- Bla balla blue bla.

then out.txt should contain

bla 11
balla 6
blue 2

and nothing else. As you can see, you should ignore capitalization, punctuation, and white space. In order to get some "meaningful" data out of this, you also have to ignore very frequent words such as "a" or "to" or "or" or "the" or... You get the idea. This site has various lists of "noise words" but I am not sure how good they are; for now I suggest we use their "27 words" as reproduced here:

the, and, a, to, of, in, i, is, that, it, on, you, this,
for, but, with, are, have, be, at, or, as, was, so, if,
out, not

Project Gutenberg is a good source for test data. I suggest Einstein, Kafka, and Marx as simple test cases. Religious texts are more voluminous and thus provide more challenging test cases, for example The Bible or The Koran. Feel free to test on whatever you want, we'll pick our test cases from Project Gutenberg as well.

In addition to this, you should compare the performance of your two binary search tree implementations and your hash table implementation from last week. Measure the running time of your WordFreq program for the two hash table implementations you have access to (from last week) and the two binary search tree implementation for this week. Use texts of different sizes and different word distributions and explain the behavior of these various data structures in your README file. Compare your experimental measurements to the theoretical properties these data structures should have as well, and discuss whether your data is in line with theoretical predictions or not. If not, try to explain why not.

Deliverables

Please turn in a gzip compressed tarball of your assignment; the filename should be cs226-assign-9-login1-login2.tar.gz with login1 and login2 replaced by your Unix login names on ugradx.cs.jhu.edu. The tarball should contain no derived files whatsoever (i.e. no .class files, no .html files, etc.), but allow building all derived files. Include a README file that briefly explains what your programs do and contains any other notes you want us to check out before grading; don't forget to include your answers to "written" problems as well.

Grading

For reference, here is a short explanation of the grading criteria. Packaging refers to the proper organization of the stuff you hand in, following the guidelines for Deliverables above. Style refers to Java programming style, including things like consistent indentation, appropriate identifiers, useful comments, suitable javadoc documentation, etc. Simple, clean, readable code is what you should be aiming for. Performance refers to how fast your program can produce the required results compared to other submissions. Design refers to proper modularization and the proper choice of algorithms and data structures. Functionality refers to your programs being able to do what they should according to the specification given above; if the specification is ambiguous and you had to make a certain choice, defend that choice in your README file.

If your programs cannot be built you will get no points whatsoever. If your programs cannot be built without warnings using javac -Xlint we will take off 10% (except if you document a very good reason). If your programs fail miserably even once, i.e. terminate with an exception of any kind, we will take off 10%.

Bonus Problem

No bonus problem this week, hacking good balanced search tree code should given you enough problems already. And if you really think you need more work, you can make up your own bonus problem by now... :-)

Updated: $Id: assignment-9.html 425 2006-04-07 19:45:32Z phf $ Validate: XHTML CSS
Copyright © 2005-2006 Peter H. Fröhlich. All rights reserved.