Mark de Berg

Operations on data become more expensive when the data item is located higher in the memory hierarchy. An operation on data in CPU registers is roughly a million times faster than an operation on a data item that is located in external memory that needs to be fetched first. [...]

Many real-world algorithmic problems cannot be solved efficiently using traditional algorithmic tools, for example because the problems are NP-hard. The goal of this course is to become familiar with important algorithmic concepts and techniques needed to effectively deal with such problems. These techniques apply when we don't require the [...]