Exercises: Algorithm Correctness
May 142018Before attempting these exercises, you should read the posts on algorithm correctness, invariants and variants.
Invariants
May 142018An assertion is a claim about the state of a running program — it says that some logical condition should be true whenever a particular line of code is reached. In the previous post, we only considered assertions in code where each line is executed once, in sequence.
Of course, real algorithms are more complicated, because loops and recursion cause some code to be executed multiple times, not in a simple sequence. In this post we’ll explore invariants, which are needed to prove correctness of non-trivial algorithms.