Okay, good morning guys, Discrete Optimization Mail Bag Week Four.
You won't see me today, I'm going to be truly invisible.
I'm on the West Coast of the United States, in Seattle.
If you would see me, you know, would drop the class immediately.
I'm so exhausted that you'd think I'm going to die and not being able to
deliver any kind of certificate, so don't worry if you don't see me, it's just for
your own sanity. But I can't do much not to give you these
mailbags. So announcements, you know the mid course
survey's finishing in a week. So please, you know, fill it in if you
want to , we'll review the feedback that we got in next week's mailbag.
We have already looked at some of the stuff so this, so this is quite
interesting. We also wanted to tell you that we have
updated the VRP grader. We, we were a little bit too tough so we
lowered the bar for getting ten points and this is something that I'll cover a
little bit more in detail at the end of the mailbag.
posting your experience, so this is, this is really nice what has been happening
and, you know, when you teach the class in a regular university so what happens
is that a lot of the interactions in class you know, you, you have students,
that is happening, and you have students talking about what they do.
Other students asking questions, so the way to do this in an online class is to
go to the forum. And so I think a lot of people have
stepped up, have told, you know, other people what they were doing.
you know, give some you know, insight on what works, what doesn't work.
I think that's great. People should keep doing that.
People should ask questions. I think this is very much in the spirit
of the class, you know. And, and once again, I want to repeat
that you know, the policy, the collaboration policy is very lenient.
You can do a lot on the forum and help fellow students or ask help.
This is a very important part of the class.
this is a, a couple of slides on the statistics.
So this is, these are the students who, who are active in the assignments.
We are still, you know, above a thousand, which is, you know, or dream, you know,
achieving a, you know, a thousand certificates.
So, so this is great. Keep, keep working.
Keep, keep going. This, so this is going fine.
this is the total submission graded. Okay, and what is amazing there, you
know, can you realize we have graded 100,000 feet, 150,000 assignments at this
point. You see the curve which is graded nicely
so this is, this is good news. The number of submissions per active
students, it seems that, you know, people are basically submitting 20 times if hey
are active. So this is getting, this is stability at
a very nice point, now. That means we have a stable group of
students there. We should keep that at that level and
this is, this is great. on track part per active student, once
again, nice progression, it's going up, it's going up, that's what we want.
We want things to go up and stay going up at the same you know, rate so this is,
this is, this is good. this is an interesting slide.
Actually this is a participation part of the assignment, so there are a couple of
things interesting here. The TSP, we are almost there.
This, you know, 1,000 mark that we want. what is also interesting is that people
keep that fact and graph covering, there are more people acting on these
assignments. And so that means people are still
joining the class and trying to catch up. So this is amazing.
So that's, that's get us very excited. So, you know, you know, welcome all those
of you who are doing that and hopefully everybody is going to basically get this
bar full of TSP at the, at the 1,000 soon.
we did another thing here which is basically inside the Grade tab.
We added a plot just to stimulate everyone.
So what you see in this plot is basically on the x-axis the points awarded over,
you know, the points awarded and, and the total number of students on the y-axis.
And the curve that you see is basically the progression in the points awarded
week by week. And so the goal of course is to push this
line, this blue line, the dark blue line. You know, up and up and up so that we
stay above these lines. The one, two, three, four, five of the
various, the, the various assignments. we are at the TSP now, which is probably
the most, you know, I think we've just finished, the, the hardest part.
Part of the class where [UNKNOWN] location is, is, is easier.
There are some twists you know, there are some really interesting things in
[UNKNOWN] locations. But, but it's easier from a, from a
programming standpoint that, than that the graph coloring in and the TSB
assignments. So in a sense I think we have this hope
that this, blue curve is going to go up and stay above threshold and, and you
know, we need you obviously to actually fulfill that dream.
So keep working, keep working, guys. another thing that was interesting here
was what happened with the knapsack assignment.
You see there are this, this big jumps, that is, big, discontinuities for the
knapsack, and that's where people got stuck and then gave up.
And what we are, what we are not seeing, we are not seeing that now, at this point
for the rest, so this is much smoother, and hopefully that means that we will be
able to have that curve and keep it above the 1,000 mark.
So, you know interesting statistics. You know, we were kind of surprised to
see that. this is the VRP assignment update that I
mentioned to you. essentially, you know, it's telling you
ten points, you know, the number of points that you, you would get.
you would need before to get to get ten points and a number afterwards.
So I think it's, it's basically it's basically lowering a little bit the
standards. Because we were really, really demanding,
and so everything is being re-graded. So you can, yo can look at your score now
and, and see these changes that we have done.
it's too, it's, you know, it's, it's too very difficult to get a 10 point on this,
on this bench mark, on this, on this assignment, but it's a little bit easier
than it used to be. So what's next?
I think you know, keep up the steady progress on the assignments, you know
keep up the great work. You know put, move this curve up above
the thresholds, and next week, one of the things we'll do is review the mid-course
survey and tell you a little bit what the feedback is in the class.
So keep up the amazing optimizations. I'll see you next week, and I'll be back
in Australia. So I'll, you know, you'll see me again,
and hopefully I'll be, you know, it's not going to be too painful to watch me.
Okay guys. Thank you very much.
Talk to you soon. Bye.