Module Code: CMT120
Module Title: Fundamentals of Programming
This assignment is worth 40% of the total marks available for this mod?ule. If coursework is submitted late (and where there are no extenuating
circumstances):
1. If the assessment is submitted no later than 24 hours after the deadline,
the mark for the assessment will be capped at the minimum pass mark;
2. If the assessment is submitted more than 24 hours after the deadline,
a mark of 0 will be given for the assessment.
Your submission must include the official Coursework Submission Cover
sheet, which can be found here:
Submission Instructions
All coursework should be submitted via upload to Learning Central.
Description Type Name
Cover sheet .pdf file [Student number].pdf
Python Code 1 .py file [Student number].py
JavaScript Code 1 .js file [Student number].js
Any code submitted will be run on a system equivalent to the University
provided Windows laptop, and must be submitted as stipulated in the in?structions above. The code should run without any changes being required
to the submitted code, including editing of filenames.
Any deviation from the submission instructions above (including the
number and types of files submitted) may result in a deduction of 25% for
that question or question part.
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Staff reserve the right to invite students to a meeting to discuss course?work submissions.
Assignment
To complete this coursework, you must complete a set of programming chal?lenges in Python and JavaScript.
Each challenge can be awarded a maximum of 10 marks. Therefore,
perfectly solving five exercises will give you 50 marks (pass), and perfectly
solving all the exercises will give you 100 marks. An exercise is solved per?fectly only if high-quality functional code is submitted in both Python and
JavaScript. Providing high-quality functional code in only one programming
language results in a lower mark (i.e., five marks out of ten). Therefore, you
can still pass the coursework by only completing problems in one language,
or by completing half the problems in both languages.
You might not be able to solve all the exercises. This is fine.
The challenges are described in detail below, and you are also provided
with a set of test cases that will check whether your code produces the
required output or not. In particular, you will be given two test cases per
exercise. You should make sure that your submitted code passes the supplied
tests to ensure it functions correctly. However, please note that your code
will be tested against further/different test cases. Specifically, each exercise
will be tested against four test cases, including the two provided. You should
therefore ensure that you try to cover all possible inputs and that your code
still functions correctly.
Instructions for completing the challenges
? You will find template code for the assignment on Learning Central.
This provides two folders, python and js. Inside each folder you
will find a template.{js/py} file, in which you should complete your
solutions. You will also find a test_template.{js/py} file containing
the test cases that will check your code’s functionality, along with a
folder of test data required for some of the tests. You are also supplied
with a Readme.md file containing detailed instructions on how to run
the test cases to check your code.
? In the templates, the functions’ interfaces are given but the functions’
bodies are empty. Solve the exercises by correctly filling in the func?tions’ bodies.
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? It is forbidden to change the functions’ interfaces. However, new
functions can be defined to support the solution of the exercises.
These functions must have names that are different from those already
present in the templates.
? You are NOT allowed to import any additional modules.
? In all the exercises, you can assume that the inputs are provided in the
appropriate format and type. Therefore, error-checking is not needed.
You will be given marks for solving each problem in both programming
languages. Further marks will be awarded for solution style and quality.
The mark scheme is described in further detail later.
Exercise 1: Defying Gravity
Write a function that allows a user to introduce the distance d (in meters)
travelled by an object falling, or the time t (in seconds) taken for an object
to fall, but not both. The function should return the corresponding falling
time t or distance d, respectively. The equations to be used are provided
below:
d = 12
gt2 t = s2dg
where g is the gravitational acceleration and, for the sake of this exercise,
it can be considered equal to g = 9.81 (m/s2
).
Complete function freeFall(val,isD), taking as input a float, val,
and a bool, isD. When isD==True, val represents the value of d; otherwise,
val represents the value of t. The function should return the result of the
appropriate equation given above, rounded to the second decimal digit.
Examples:
? freeFall(1,true) should return 0.45. ? freeFall(0.45,false) should return 0.99. 3
Exercise 2: Rock-Paper-Scissor
Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS, in short) is a hand game usually played between
two people, in which each player simultaneously forms one of three shapes
with an outstretched hand. These shapes are rock (a closed fist), paper
(a flat hand), and scissors (a fist with the index finger and middle finger
extended, forming a V). A game has only two possible outcomes: a draw,
or a win for one player and a loss for the other. A player who decides to
play rock will beat another player who has chosen scissors (“rock crushes
scissors”), but will lose to one who has played paper (“paper covers rock”);
a play of paper will lose to a play of scissors (“scissors cuts paper”). If both
players choose the same shape, the game is tied and is usually immediately
replayed to break the tie (Wikipedia contributors, 2021d).
Write a function that, given a player’s strategy for a series of games of
RPS, will return the winning strategy.
Function RPS(s) takes as argument a string s. The string can only con?tain the letters R, P, or S, representing rock, paper, and scissor, respectively.
Each letter corresponds to the shape chosen by the other player on each
game. The function should return a string of shapes that wins every single
game.
Examples:
? RPS(‘RPS’) should return ‘PSR’. ? RPS(‘PRSPRR’) should return ‘SPRSPP’.
Exercise 3: List to String
In this exercise you are required to convert an input list into a string. The
input list can only contain two types of items: a single letter (i.e., A-Z and
a-z, case sensitive) or another list with the same properties. The output
string should be constructed in such a way that:
? It starts and ends with square brackets (i.e., [ and ]).
? The items of the list that are letters are simply concatenated to the
string.
? The content of a sublist should be placed in between square brackets.
Complete function list2str(l), which takes as input a list satisfying
the above properties and provides as output a string, as described above.
Examples:
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? list2str([‘a’,[‘b’,‘c’]]) should return ‘[a[bc]]’. ? list2str([‘a’,[‘b’,[‘c’]]]) should return ‘[a[b[c]]]’.
Please, note that the output of the function is a string, rather than a list, as
it is quoted.
Exercise 4: Text Preprocessing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of linguistics, computer
science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between
computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to
process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. The goal is a
computer capable of ”understanding” the contents of documents, including
the contextual nuances of the language within them (Wikipedia contributors,
2021c).
Traditionally, before applying advanced NLP techniques, a document
must be preprocessed.
Complete function textPreprocessing(text) which applies the follow?ing preprocessing pipeline to a string text:
1. Removal of all punctuation marks .?!,:;-[]{}()’". E.g., the string
‘Hi! The cats are playing’ becomes ‘Hi the cats are playing’).
2. Conversion of text to lower case (e.g., ‘hi the cats are playing’).
3. Segmentation into a list of words (e.g., [‘hi’,‘the’,‘cats’,‘are’,‘playing’]).
4. Removal of stopwords. Stopwords are words that are so common that
do not much information and, therefore, can be removed. For this
exercise, make use of the following list of stopwords:
i, a, about, am, an, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, how, in, is, it, of, on,
or, that, the, this, to, was, what, when, where, who, will, with
(e.g., the result of this step on the sample sentence would be
[‘hi’,‘cats’,‘playing’])
5. Stemming, which aims at reducing different forms of a word into a
common base form. For the sake of this exercise, you are required to
apply a very crude stemmer, based on the following rule: if a word ends
in -ed, -ing, or -s, remove the ending (e.g., [‘hi’,‘cat’,‘play’]).
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The function should return the result as a list of strings.
Examples:
? textPreprocessing(‘I think, therefore I am.’) should return
[‘think’,‘therefore’]. ? textPreprocessing(‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’)
should return [‘life’,‘give’,‘you’,‘lemon’,‘make’,‘lemonade’].
Exercise 5: Dictionary Dominance
Complete function isGreaterThan(dict1,dict2) that takes as input two
dictionaries in Python, or two Objects in JavaScript, having only string
keys and numerical values. The function returns True if and only if dict1 is
greater than or equal to dict2 with respect to all the keys, and it is strictly
greater than dict2 in at least one key.
Examples:
? dict1={‘a’:1,‘b’:2} and dict2={‘a’:1,‘b’:1}. In this case, dict1
is equal to dict2 with respect to a, but it is greater with respect to b;
therefore, the function should return True. ? dict1={‘a’:1,‘b’:1} and dict2={‘a’:1,‘b’:1}. In this case, dict1
and dict2 are equivalent; therefore, the function should return False. ? dict1={‘a’:1,‘b’:0} and dict2={‘a’:0,‘b’:1}. In this case, dict1
is greater than dict2 with respect to a, but it is lower with respect to
b; therefore, the function should return False.
The two dictionaries/objects might not necessarily have the same keys.
If a dictionary/object does not have a key that the other one has, the former
is lower than the latter with respect to that key, regardless of the value that
the latter might have.
Examples:
? dict1={‘a’:1,‘b’:2,‘c’:-10} and dict2={‘a’:1,‘b’:1}. dict1
is greater than dict2 with respect to all the keys; therefore, the func?tion should return True. ? dict1={‘a’:1,‘b’:1} and dict2={‘c’:0}. In this case, dict1 is not
greater than dict2, as dict1 does not have the key c; therefore the
function should return False. 6
Exercise 6: Reading CSV Files
A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a
comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record
consists of one or more fields, separated by commas (Wikipedia contributors,
2021b).
Write function CSVsum(filename) that reads a CSV file with or without
a header, and provides as output a list of the sums of each column.
Example: Suppose that the following is the content of file test.csv:
var1 , var2 , var3
1 . 0 , 2 . 0 , 3. 0
4 . 0 , 1 . 0 , 3 . 0
0 . 0 , 5 . 0 , 0. 0
which translates into the following table:
var1 var2 var3
1.0 2.0 3.0
4.0 1.0 3.0
0.0 5.0 0.0
Then, CSVsum(‘test.csv’) should return [5.0,8.0,6.0].
Exercise 7: String to List
This exercise is basically the opposite of Exercise 3.
You are now required to convert an input string of letters and square
brackets (i.e., [ and ]) into a list of letters and lists. The square brackets
identify where a list starts and ends, while each letter translates into an
element of the corresponding list. Read the description of Exercise 3 and
see the examples below for more information.
Complete function str2list(l), which takes as input a string satisfying
the above properties and provides as output the corresponding list.
Examples:
? str2list(‘[abc]’) should return [‘a’,‘b’,‘c’]. ? str2list(‘[a[bc]]’) should return [‘a’,[‘b’,‘c’]]. 7
Exercise 8: Spacemon Competition
Spacemons are spirits that come from other planets of our star system.
When two spacemons meet, they feel the urge to fight until one or them is
defeated. Warlocks conjure, tame, and train teams of spacemons, to make
them compete in a spectacular tournament.
Note: the paragraph above is a work of fiction.
In this exercise, you are required to complete the function
spacemonSim(roster1,roster2), which simulates the result of a competi?tion between two teams of spacemons, roster1 and roster2; the function
returns True if roster1 wins, or False otherwise.
Disclaimer: no spacemon was harmed in the making of this exercise.
A spacemon is represented as a three-element tuple: (planet, energy, power)
in Python, in JavaScript as a three-element array: [planet, energy, power]
where planet represents the type of the spacemon, energy is its stamina,
and power is its ability to reduce another spacemon’s energy. A roster is
simply a list of spacemons.
The planet of a spacemon is particularly important as certain types are
stronger/weaker against others, as represented in Table 1.
att \ def Mercury Venus Earth Mars
Mercury ×1 ×2 ×1 ×0.5
Venus ×0.5 ×1 ×2 ×1
Earth ×1 ×0.5 ×1 ×2
Mars ×2 ×1 ×0.5 ×1
Table 1: Attack multipliers depending on type.
In the table, the rows correspond to the attacking spacemon, the columns
correspond to the defending spacemon. The cells show the multiplier that
must be applied to the attacker’s power to determine how much energy the
defender loses.
A competition is divided into one-on-one matches. Spacemons take
part in the competition according to their position in the roster. There?fore, the first match is between the first spacemon of each roster. The
spacemons take turns to attack, with the first roster always attacking first.
When a spacemon attacks, the total damage inflicted on the opponent is:
damage = type_mult * power, where type_mult is the multiplier specified
in Table 1. The damage is then subtracted from the opponent’s energy. If
a spacemon’s energy drops to 0 (or less), the spacemon is defeated and the
match ends. Then, a new match starts between the winner of the previ-
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ous match and the next spacemon in the opponent’s roster. The winning
spacemon does not recover any lost energy between matches; also, the first
spacemon to attack is, again, the one from the first roster.
Example: Let us consider the following rosters.
? roster1 is comprised of (‘Earth’,100,10) and (‘Earth’,100,10). ? roster2 is comprised of (‘Mercury’,80,10) and (‘Venus’,80,10).
In the first match, the Earth spacemon defeats the Mercury spacemon; how?ever, it loses 70 points of energy. In the second match, the former winner
is defeated by the Venus spacemon, which receives 10 points of damage. Fi?nally, the Venus spacemon wins the third match, losing 35 points of energy.
The second roster wins the competition and, therefore, the function returns
False.
Exercise 9: 2D Most Rewarding Shortest Path
Complete the function rewardShortPath(env), which finds the shortest
path from a starting cell A to an arrival cell B on a grid, having the highest
reward.
Attribute env describes the environment. An environment is a matrix
that can contain the following characters: A, B, O, X, and R. A and B are
the starting and arrival cell, respectively. An O represents an empty space,
an X represents an obstacle, and an R represents a reward. An example is
presented in Table 2.
A X R R R O O O X B O O O O R
Table 2: Sample 2D environment.
A cell is adjacent only to other cells in the same row or column. For
example, the cell containing an A in the top-left corner is adjacent only to
the X on the left and the O at the bottom - diagonals are not considered
adjacent.
When searching for the shortest path, only empty and reward cells (Os
and Rs, respectively) can be traversed. If a path passes through a reward
cell, the reward is collected. Figure 1 shows two shortest paths (note: there
are actually more than two shortest paths in this example), one approaching
the B from the top (in red) and the other from the bottom (in blue); both
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have a length of seven. However, the former has a total reward of three,
while the latter has a total reward of one. Therefore, the red path is the one
that the function is looking for.
Figure 1: Two shortest paths.
Parameter env is given to the function as a list of sublists in Python,
or an Array of arrays in JavaScript, where each sublist/array contains char?acters corresponding to a row. The representation corresponding to the
environment above would be:
[[‘A’,‘X’,‘R’,‘R’,‘R’],[‘O’,‘O’,‘O’,‘X’,‘B’],[‘O’,‘O’,‘O’,‘O’,‘R’]].
The function should return a 2-value tuple in Python, or a 2-value Array
in JavaScript containing the length of the shortest path and the total reward
collected.
Example: Given the environment above, the function should return
(7,3).
Hint: You might want to enumerate all the paths from A to B (excluding
those that pass through the same cell twice). Then, you can can choose the
shortest path having the highest reward.
Exercise 10: Social Network Analysis
Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures
through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked
structures in terms of nodes (individual actors, people, or things within the
network) and the ties, edges, or links (relationships or interactions) that
connect them (Wikipedia contributors, 2021e). Figure 2 shows a sample
social network with seven actors.
Network (and graphs) can be represented as adjacency matrices. An
adjacency matrix is a square matrix having as many rows and columns as
there are actors in the network. A is 1 if the actors corresponding to the row
and the column are connected by an edge, and is 0 otherwise. The matrix
corresponding to the social network in Figure 2 can be found below in Table
3. In turn, matrices can be represented as a list of sublists, as explained in
Exercise 9.
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Figure 2: Sample social network with 7 actors.
A B C D E F G
A 0 1 1 0 0 0 0
B 1 0 1 1 0 0 0
C 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
D 0 1 0 0 1 1 1
E 0 0 0 1 0 1 0
F 0 0 0 1 1 0 1
G 0 0 0 1 0 1 0
Table 3: Adjacency matrix corresponding to the social network in Figure 2.
In graph theory, a clique is a subset of nodes of a graph such that every
two distinct nodes in the clique are adjacent; that is, every pair of nodes in
the clique must be connected. A maximal clique is a clique that cannot be
extended by including one more adjacent vertex (Wikipedia contributors,
2021a). In SNA, a clique represents a tightly-knit group or community.
Figure 3 illustrates all the maximal cliques that can be found in the sample
network: (A,B,C), (B,D), (D,F,G), and (D,E,F). Following the definition
above, node E cannot be added to the yellow click (D,F,G), as node E is
not connected to node G and, therefore, (D,E,F,G) would not be a clique.
Figure 3: Maximal cliques in the sample social network. Each clique is
highlighted in a different colour.
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As it can be seen from the example, a node can belong to multiple
maximal cliques. It is interesting to identify actors that belong to multiple
cliques, as they can act as bridges between communities and be extremely
influential.
In this exercise you need to complete the function cliqueCounter(network)
which, given the adjacency matrix of a social network as a list of sublists or
an Array of arrays, returns the number of maximal cliques that each actor
belongs to as a list.
Example: The result of applying clickCounter(network) on the ad?jacency matrix in Table 3 would be [1,2,1,3,1,2,1].
Criteria for assessment
Each exercise can be awarded a maximum of 10 marks. Therefore, perfectly
solving five exercises will give you 50 marks (pass), and perfectly solving ten
exercises will give you 100 marks.
Each exercise is marked for both function (8 marks max) and style/qual?ity (2 marks max). Exercises that are not a real attempt at solving the
problem presented will receive zero marks.
Functionality [8 marks/exercise max] The functional part of the sub?mission is automatically marked by scripts that run the completed function
against a set of test cases. You will be provided with two test cases per ex?ercise. During marking, each exercise will be tested against four test cases,
including the two provided. For each language (Python and JavaScript) and
exercise, passing one test will award you 1 mark. Therefore, the maximum
functionality mark of 8 will be given only if all the tests are passed in both
languages.