Final Exam

The final exam is scheduled for Thursday December 13 from 12:00 until 2:30.   It will be closed-book,  but you may have one 3x5 card of hand-written notes.  No calculators or electronic devices will be allowed (you may leave answers in forms like $ \log(12 \pi) $ ).  You will write your answers an the exam itself, no "blue-books" will be needed.

The final exam will be 2 and a half hours (150 minutes).  It has 14 questions worth from 4 to 8 points (80 points total), and many of the questions have multiple parts.  This gives a little less than 2 minutes per point.  I plan to weight final points equally with the homework points in the final grading. 

Attachments include a preliminary list of topics and some sample questions.  At least one of the sample questions covers material that we are unlikely to get to this quarter.  In addition, I have recently been using matching-style questions such as match each algorithm/method on the right with something related to it on the left.  For example, "neural networks" might be matched with "local minima" if that was not appropriate for the other listted algortihms.