We come back. Discrete Optimization, Mail Bag Week 3.
I'm very happy to, have you back here. you may wonder why I am invisible,
actually I'm not invisible. I'm in a conference in the Yellow
Mountain in China. But you see, I can't keep thinking about
Cousera. And that's why we really wanted to send
you this mail bag. Okay?
Stay tuned. You won't see me, but I'm there.
So, first things first, key announcement please take the mid-course survey.
We are the middle you know, just in the middle of the class.
We want you to give as much feedback as you can.
You are the active students, see if you are listening to me right now.
And we want to hear from you to make the next part of the classes move as
possible. I'm going to update you, with the number
of statistic, the number of active students now is around 9000.
You know, some decrease compared to last week, nothing that we didn't expect this
is the hard part of the class right now. some more statistic about the videos and,
and, the various mail bags that I've been seeing.
For instance, 2,000 views of the second mail bag last week, about 13,000 views of
the introductory video. Thinks you know, people are looking at
this. this is the number of students active in
assignment this is decreasing, obviously. you can see that we had another decrease
from [UNKNOWN] another decrease for TSP, this is absolutely what we anticipated.
These are the toughest assignment of the class.
these are the number of submission graded, they are also decreasing with the
number of students obviously. This is the slide which is actually
pretty interesting, this is the number of submission per active students, and what
you can see that, the students who are active are very active.
Okay, so what the, what the graph is showing that they are more active.
Obviously this is an average so, they may stay as active as, as before but the
average is increasing. This is what we want to see, this is very
reassuring. This is the slides that we like the most.
what you see over there is about 13,000 assignments all graph colored, this is
terrific guys. this means that there are a lot of
students in this class who are really dedicated and are trying to get through
this material and these assignments which are really difficult.
As we told you, graph coloring is a nightmare, as you have experienced.
so keep going you know, keep progressing, we want more numbers for the TSPs.
this is also an interesting slide in a sense, so what you see on x-axis are the
number of points awarded so far. And on the y-axis is basically the total
number of students which ever will be awarded to these points.
And so, what you can see is that they are about 1000 students that are above
threshold as far as, as the assignments are concerned at graphical coloring.
So, the vertical lines you see there, are basically the great, you should have, the
number of points that you should have for having a passing grade in the class.
And so, you are seeing that it has been sharply decreasing for graph coloring,
and once again no big surprise because this is what we expected.
But we are above the thousand mark for graph coloring and they, this is exactly
where we want to be. And so, what we need to do is to lift
this blue curve, so that it stays above 10,000 well, above 1000 for everyone of
the other assignments. This is really the goal of this class.
The dream that we have we'd like to give out a 1,000 certificates.
And obviously the problem that we have is we can't lower our standards, we don't
want to lower the standards we want to make this class you know, as, as hard as
a senior undergraduate or a beginning graduate class.
In a, you know, very high standards of you know, university and, and therefore
we don't want to lower these standards. But we do everything we can to help you
succeed and meet these goals. And so, in a sense you know, for doing
this, we're going to do two things. So, the first thing we're going to do is
that we will be adjusting the stereo slightly, which will allow more time for
the TSP. Let you guys breathe a little bit, get
this TSP you know, up to above the 1000 mark.
And also, if you are successful in these assignments, go to the website and give
tips to other people, you can. So, we encourage collaboration
obviously,we encourage people talk about their solution,the final problem should
be your own. But you can discuss solutions with other
people, you can give tips to other people, you can guide them towards good
solution. So, this is one of the things we had in
the, in the University version of this, of this class.
So, people, we had this session where people could, you know, tell other people
what they were doing. It's very good to actually share your
experience. You don't have to give all the tricks,
but you can say, oh, I tried this and this worked very well for me.
so, this is the new schedule, so we are pushing TSP a little bit back you know,
pushing every one of the future assignment by one week.
Obviously, this is a you know, eight week schedule so, [INAUDIBLE] one final week
for tuning everything. So, we are basically adding this week and
we want to add it at this point. Because this is the point where we
believe it makes the most sense. People can breathe a little bit more,
they can focus on TSP. Get above this 1000 mark and then we
gotta get close to the dream that we have of putting all these students through
the, through the entire class and getting their certificates.
once again, you know, I want people to collaborate, we want a lot of people
interacting on the forum. What you see there, you know, some great
threats where you know, people are talking about the implementation of graph
coloring. People talking about the implementation
of TSP and [UNKNOWN] on TSPs and things like that.
Check those things. There is a lot of information of the on
the, on the forum and please you know, you can volunteer that kind of
information and tell people the kind of things that you have been doing.
So, these three threads, look at them, they are interesting.
They give you a lot of feedback, they also speed up your work tremendously.
Okay, so what's next? Continue enjoying traveling salesman
problem. It's tog also it's time also to start
looking at the LP and the MIP lectures such that you will get on top of those
before you do the warehouse location assignment.
And you know, have fun, I think this is this is going really well.
I think we have a lot of dedicated students we want to bring you know, these
1000 students above that mark that's the goal that we have.
Okay guys, have fun you know, keep going we are very happy.