NdAbdulsalaam / Harvard-CS50

Practice and assignment code for the course; Introduction to computer science by Harvard university on edx

Edx: Introduction to Computer Science

This repository contains solutions to C programming coding exercises in the course mentioned above.

📬

• This problem can be found at OpenCourseWare CS50
• All the codes were tested and passed on the CS50 coding space
• If you find any error or face any issue, let me know through issue section
• The questions are as presented exactly in the course without any modification
• If you don't find any solution to the practice quiz or module assessment, open an issue including the problem description and the week number. 🔥

DISCLAIMER

This work is only meant for practicing and not to be copied for submision, as this violates the cs50's academic honesty. Howevre, uploading it to Github is considered to reasonable based on this discussion

Introduction to Computer Science by the Harvard University.

• WEEK ONE:

  • Mario
  • Credit

• WEEK TWO:

  • Readability
  • Substitution

• WEEK THREE:

  • Plurality
  • Tideman

• WEEK FOUR:

  • Volume
  • Filter Less
  • Recover

• WEEK FIVE:

  • Inheritance
  • Speller

• WEEK SIX:

  • World Cup
  • Mario
  • Credit
  • Readability
  • DNA

• WEEK SEVEN:

  • Songs
  • Movies
  • Fiftyville

Mario

Let’s recreate those pyramids in C, albeit in text, using hashes (#) for bricks, a la the below. Each hash is a bit taller than it is wide, so the pyramids themselves will also be taller than they are wide.

   #  #
  ##  ##
 ###  ###
####  ####

The program we’ll write will be called mario. And let’s allow the user to decide just how tall the pyramids should be by first prompting them for a positive integer between, say, 1 and 8, inclusive.

Here’s how the program might work if the user inputs 8 when prompted:

$ ./mario
Height: 8
       #  #
      ##  ##
     ###  ###
    ####  ####
   #####  #####
  ######  ######
 #######  #######
########  ########

If the user doesn’t, in fact, input a positive integer between 1 and 8, inclusive, when prompted, the program should re-prompt the user until they cooperate:

$ ./mario
Height: -1
Height: 0
Height: 42
Height: 50
Height: 4
   #  #
  ##  ##
 ###  ###
####  ####

Notice that width of the “gap” between adjacent pyramids is equal to the width of two hashes, irrespective of the pyramids’ heights.

Credit

A credit (or debit) card, of course, is a plastic card with which you can pay for goods and services. Printed on that card is a number that’s also stored in a database somewhere, so that when your card is used to buy something, the creditor knows whom to bill. There are a lot of people with credit cards in this world, so those numbers are pretty long: American Express uses 15-digit numbers, MasterCard uses 16-digit numbers, and Visa uses 13- and 16-digit numbers. And those are decimal numbers (0 through 9), not binary, which means, for instance, that American Express could print as many as 10^15 = 1,000,000,000,000,000 unique cards! (That’s, um, a quadrillion.)

Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because credit card numbers actually have some structure to them. All American Express numbers start with 34 or 37; most MasterCard numbers start with 51, 52, 53, 54, or 55 (they also have some other potential starting numbers which we won’t concern ourselves with for this problem); and all Visa numbers start with 4. But credit card numbers also have a “checksum” built into them, a mathematical relationship between at least one number and others. That checksum enables computers (or humans who like math) to detect typos (e.g., transpositions), if not fraudulent numbers, without having to query a database, which can be slow. Of course, a dishonest mathematician could certainly craft a fake number that nonetheless respects the mathematical constraint, so a database lookup is still necessary for more rigorous checks.

Luhn’s Algorithm

So what’s the secret formula? Well, most cards use an algorithm invented by Hans Peter Luhn of IBM. According to Luhn’s algorithm, you can determine if a credit card number is (syntactically) valid as follows:

1. Multiply every other digit by 2, starting with the number’s second-to-last digit, and then add those products’ digits together.
2. Add the sum to the sum of the digits that weren’t multiplied by 2.
3. If the total’s last digit is 0 (or, put more formally, if the total modulo 10 is congruent to 0), the number is valid!

That’s kind of confusing, so let’s try an example with David’s Visa: 4003600000000014.

1. For the sake of discussion, let’s first underline every other digit, starting with the number’s second-to-last digit:

    4003600000000014
   
    Okay, let’s multiply each of the underlined digits by 2:
   
    1•2 + 0•2 + 0•2 + 0•2 + 0•2 + 6•2 + 0•2 + 4•2
   
    That gives us:
   
    2 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 12 + 0 + 8
   
    Now let’s add those products’ digits (i.e., not the products themselves) together:
   
    2 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 8 = 13
   

2. Now let’s add that sum (13) to the sum of the digits that weren’t multiplied by 2 (starting from the end):

    13 + 4 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 3 + 0 = 20
   

3. Yup, the last digit in that sum (20) is a 0, so David’s card is legit!

So, validating credit card numbers isn’t hard, but it does get a bit tedious by hand. Let’s write a program.

Implementation Details

In the file called credit.c in the credit directory, write a program that prompts the user for a credit card number and then reports (via printf) whether it is a valid American Express, MasterCard, or Visa card number, per the definitions of each’s format herein. So that we can automate some tests of your code, we ask that your program’s last line of output be AMEX\n or MASTERCARD\n or VISA\n or INVALID\n, nothing more, nothing less. For simplicity, you may assume that the user’s input will be entirely numeric (i.e., devoid of hyphens, as might be printed on an actual card) and that it won’t have leading zeroes. But do not assume that the user’s input will fit in an int! Best to use get_long from CS50’s library to get users’ input. (Why?)

Consider the below representative of how your own program should behave when passed a valid credit card number (sans hyphens).

$ ./credit
Number: 4003600000000014
VISA

Now, get_long itself will reject hyphens (and more) anyway:

$ ./credit
Number: 4003-6000-0000-0014
Number: foo
Number: 4003600000000014
VISA

But it’s up to you to catch inputs that are not credit card numbers (e.g., a phone number), even if numeric:

$ ./credit
Number: 6176292929
INVALID

Test out your program with a whole bunch of inputs, both valid and invalid. (We certainly will!) Here are a few card numbers that PayPal recommends for testing.

If your program behaves incorrectly on some inputs (or doesn’t compile at all), time to debug!

Readability

For this problem, you’ll implement a program that calculates the approximate grade level needed to comprehend some text, per the below.

$ ./readability
Text: Congratulations! Today is your day. You're off to Great Places! You're off and away!
Grade 3

Background

According to Scholastic, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web is between a second- and fourth-grade reading level, and Lois Lowry’s The Giver is between an eighth- and twelfth-grade reading level. What does it mean, though, for a book to be at a particular reading level?

Well, in many cases, a human expert might read a book and make a decision on the grade (i.e., year in school) for which they think the book is most appropriate. But an algorithm could likely figure that out too!

So what sorts of traits are characteristic of higher reading levels? Well, longer words probably correlate with higher reading levels. Likewise, longer sentences probably correlate with higher reading levels, too.

A number of “readability tests” have been developed over the years that define formulas for computing the reading level of a text. One such readability test is the Coleman-Liau index. The Coleman-Liau index of a text is designed to output that (U.S.) grade level that is needed to understand some text. The formula is

index = 0.0588 * L - 0.296 * S - 15.8

where L is the average number of letters per 100 words in the text, and S is the average number of sentences per 100 words in the text.

Let’s write a program called readability that takes a text and determines its reading level. For example, if user types in a line of text from Dr. Seuss, the program should behave as follows:

$ ./readability
Text: Congratulations! Today is your day. You're off to Great Places! You're off and away!
Grade 3

The text the user inputted has 65 letters, 4 sentences, and 14 words. 65 letters per 14 words is an average of about 464.29 letters per 100 words (because 65 / 14 * 100 = 464.29). And 4 sentences per 14 words is an average of about 28.57 sentences per 100 words (because 4 / 14 * 100 = 28.57). Plugged into the Coleman-Liau formula, and rounded to the nearest integer, we get an answer of 3 (because 0.0588 * 464.29 - 0.296 * 28.57 - 15.8 = 3): so this passage is at a third-grade reading level.

Let’s try another one:

$ ./readability
Text: Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways. For one thing, he hated the summer holidays more than any other time of year. For another, he really wanted to do his homework, but was forced to do it in secret, in the dead of the night. And he also happened to be a wizard.
Grade 5

This text has 214 letters, 4 sentences, and 56 words. That comes out to about 382.14 letters per 100 words, and 7.14 sentences per 100 words. Plugged into the Coleman-Liau formula, we get a fifth-grade reading level.

As the average number of letters and words per sentence increases, the Coleman-Liau index gives the text a higher reading level. If you were to take this paragraph, for instance, which has longer words and sentences than either of the prior two examples, the formula would give the text an twelfth-grade reading level.

$ ./readability
Text: As the average number of letters and words per sentence increases, the Coleman-Liau index gives the text a higher reading level. If you were to take this paragraph, for instance, which has longer words and sentences than either of the prior two examples, the formula would give the text an twelfth-grade reading level.
Grade 12

Specification

Design and implement a program, readability, that computes the Coleman-Liau index of text.

• Implement your program in a file called readability.c in a directory called readability.
• Your program must prompt the user for a string of text using get_string.
• Your program should count the number of letters, words, and sentences in the text. You may assume that a letter is any lowercase character from a to z or any uppercase character from A to Z, any sequence of characters separated by spaces should count as a word, and that any occurrence of a period, exclamation point, or question mark indicates the end of a sentence.
• Your program should print as output "Grade X" where X is the grade level computed by the Coleman-Liau formula, rounded to the nearest integer.
• If the resulting index number is 16 or higher (equivalent to or greater than a senior undergraduate reading level), your program should output "Grade 16+" instead of giving the exact index number. If the index number is less than 1, your program should output "Before Grade 1".

Substitution

For this problem, you’ll write a program that implements a substitution cipher, per the below.

$ ./substitution JTREKYAVOGDXPSNCUIZLFBMWHQ
plaintext:  HELLO
ciphertext: VKXXN

Background

In a substitution cipher, we “encrypt” (i.e., conceal in a reversible way) a message by replacing every letter with another letter. To do so, we use a key: in this case, a mapping of each of the letters of the alphabet to the letter it should correspond to when we encrypt it. To “decrypt” the message, the receiver of the message would need to know the key, so that they can reverse the process: translating the encrypt text (generally called ciphertext) back into the original message (generally called plaintext).

A key, for example, might be the string NQXPOMAFTRHLZGECYJIUWSKDVB. This 26-character key means that A (the first letter of the alphabet) should be converted into N (the first character of the key), B (the second letter of the alphabet) should be converted into Q (the second character of the key), and so forth.

A message like HELLO, then, would be encrypted as FOLLE, replacing each of the letters according to the mapping determined by the key.

Let’s write a program called substitution that enables you to encrypt messages using a substitution cipher. At the time the user executes the program, they should decide, by providing a command-line argument, on what the key should be in the secret message they’ll provide at runtime.

Here are a few examples of how the program might work. For example, if the user inputs a key of YTNSHKVEFXRBAUQZCLWDMIPGJO and a plaintext of HELLO:

$ ./substitution YTNSHKVEFXRBAUQZCLWDMIPGJO
plaintext:  HELLO
ciphertext: EHBBQ

Here’s how the program might work if the user provides a key of VCHPRZGJNTLSKFBDQWAXEUYMOI and a plaintext of hello, world:

$ ./substitution VCHPRZGJNTLSKFBDQWAXEUYMOI
plaintext:  hello, world
ciphertext: jrssb, ybwsp

Notice that neither the comma nor the space were substituted by the cipher. Only substitute alphabetical characters! Notice, too, that the case of the original message has been preserved. Lowercase letters remain lowercase, and uppercase letters remain uppercase.

Whether the characters in the key itself are uppercase or lowercase doesn’t matter. A key of VCHPRZGJNTLSKFBDQWAXEUYMOI is functionally identical to a key of vchprzgjntlskfbdqwaxeuymoi (as is, for that matter, VcHpRzGjNtLsKfBdQwAxEuYmOi).

And what if a user doesn’t provide a valid key? The program should explain with an error message:

$ ./substitution ABC
Key must contain 26 characters.

Or really doesn’t cooperate, providing no command-line argument at all? The program should remind the user how to use the program:

$ ./substitution
Usage: ./substitution key

Or really, really doesn’t cooperate, providing too many command-line arguments? The program should also remind the user how to use the program:

$ ./substitution 1 2 3
Usage: ./substitution key

Specification

Design and implement a program, substitution, that encrypts messages using a substitution cipher.

• Implement your program in a file called substitution.c in a directory called substitution.
• Your program must accept a single command-line argument, the key to use for the substitution. The key itself should be case-insensitive, so whether any character in the key is uppercase or lowercase should not affect the behavior of your program.
• If your program is executed without any command-line arguments or with more than one command-line argument, your program should print an error message of your choice (with printf) and return from main a value of 1 (which tends to signify an error) immediately.
• If the key is invalid (as by not containing 26 characters, containing any character that is not an alphabetic character, or not containing each letter exactly once), your program should print an error message of your choice (with printf) and return from main a value of 1 immediately.
• Your program must output plaintext: (without a newline) and then prompt the user for a string of plaintext (using get_string).
• Your program must output ciphertext: (without a newline) followed by the plaintext’s corresponding ciphertext, with each alphabetical character in the plaintext substituted for the corresponding character in the ciphertext; non-alphabetical characters should be outputted unchanged.
• Your program must preserve case: capitalized letters must remain capitalized letters; lowercase letters must remain lowercase letters.
• After outputting ciphertext, you should print a newline. Your program should then exit by returning 0 from main.

Plurality

Implement a program that runs a plurality election, per the below.

$ ./plurality Alice Bob Charlie
Number of voters: 4
Vote: Alice
Vote: Bob
Vote: Charlie
Vote: Alice
Alice

Background

Elections come in all shapes and sizes. In the UK, the Prime Minister is officially appointed by the monarch, who generally chooses the leader of the political party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons. The United States uses a multi-step Electoral College process where citizens vote on how each state should allocate Electors who then elect the President.

Perhaps the simplest way to hold an election, though, is via a method commonly known as the “plurality vote” (also known as “first-past-the-post” or “winner take all”). In the plurality vote, every voter gets to vote for one candidate. At the end of the election, whichever candidate has the greatest number of votes is declared the winner of the election.

Specification

Complete the implementation of plurality.c in such a way that the program simulates a plurality vote election.

• Complete the vote function.
  • vote takes a single argument, a string called name, representing the name of the candidate who was voted for.
  • If name matches one of the names of the candidates in the election, then update that candidate’s vote total to account for the new vote. The vote function in this case should return true to indicate a successful ballot.
  • If name does not match the name of any of the candidates in the election, no vote totals should change, and the vote function should return false to indicate an invalid ballot.
  • You may assume that no two candidates will have the same name.
• Complete the print_winner function.
  • The function should print out the name of the candidate who received the most votes in the election, and then print a newline.
  • It is possible that the election could end in a tie if multiple candidates each have the maximum number of votes. In that case, you should output the names of each of the winning candidates, each on a separate line.

Usage

Your program should behave per the examples below.

$ ./plurality Alice Bob
Number of voters: 3
Vote: Alice
Vote: Bob
Vote: Alice
Alice

$ ./plurality Alice Bob
Number of voters: 3
Vote: Alice
Vote: Charlie
Invalid vote.
Vote: Alice
Alice

$ ./plurality Alice Bob Charlie
Number of voters: 5
Vote: Alice
Vote: Charlie
Vote: Bob
Vote: Bob
Vote: Alice
Alice
Bob

Tideman

Implement a program that runs a Tideman election in C, per the below.

$ ./tideman Alice Bob Charlie
Number of voters: 5
Rank 1: Alice
Rank 2: Charlie
Rank 3: Bob

Rank 1: Alice
Rank 2: Charlie
Rank 3: Bob

Rank 1: Bob
Rank 2: Charlie
Rank 3: Alice

Rank 1: Bob
Rank 2: Charlie
Rank 3: Alice

Rank 1: Charlie
Rank 2: Alice
Rank 3: Bob

Charlie

Background

You already know about plurality elections, which follow a very simple algorithm for determining the winner of an election: every voter gets one vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

But the plurality vote does have some disadvantages. What happens, for instance, in an election with three candidates, and the ballots below are cast?

A plurality vote would here declare a tie between Alice and Bob, since each has two votes. But is that the right outcome?

There’s another kind of voting system known as a ranked-choice voting system. In a ranked-choice system, voters can vote for more than one candidate. Instead of just voting for their top choice, they can rank the candidates in order of preference. The resulting ballots might therefore look like the below.

Here, each voter, in addition to specifying their first preference candidate, has also indicated their second and third choices. And now, what was previously a tied election could now have a winner. The race was originally tied between Alice and Bob. But the voter who chose Charlie preferred Alice over Bob, so Alice could here be declared the winner.

Ranked choice voting can also solve yet another potential drawback of plurality voting. Take a look at the following ballots.

Who should win this election? In a plurality vote where each voter chooses their first preference only, Charlie wins this election with four votes compared to only three for Bob and two for Alice. (Note that, if you’re familiar with the instant runoff voting system, Charlie wins here under that system as well). Alice, however, might reasonably make the argument that she should be the winner of the election instead of Charlie: after all, of the nine voters, a majority (five of them) preferred Alice over Charlie, so most people would be happier with Alice as the winner instead of Charlie.

Alice is, in this election, the so-called “Condorcet winner” of the election: the person who would have won any head-to-head matchup against another candidate. If the election had been just Alice and Bob, or just Alice and Charlie, Alice would have won.

The Tideman voting method (also known as “ranked pairs”) is a ranked-choice voting method that’s guaranteed to produce the Condorcet winner of the election if one exists.

Generally speaking, the Tideman method works by constructing a “graph” of candidates, where an arrow (i.e. edge) from candidate A to candidate B indicates that candidate A wins against candidate B in a head-to-head matchup. The graph for the above election, then, would look like the below.

The arrow from Alice to Bob means that more voters prefer Alice to Bob (5 prefer Alice, 4 prefer Bob). Likewise, the other arrows mean that more voters prefer Alice to Charlie, and more voters prefer Charlie to Bob.

Looking at this graph, the Tideman method says the winner of the election should be the “source” of the graph (i.e. the candidate that has no arrow pointing at them). In this case, the source is Alice — Alice is the only one who has no arrow pointing at her, which means nobody is preferred head-to-head over Alice. Alice is thus declared the winner of the election.

It’s possible, however, that when the arrows are drawn, there is no Condorcet winner. Consider the below ballots.

Between Alice and Bob, Alice is preferred over Bob by a 7-2 margin. Between Bob and Charlie, Bob is preferred over Charlie by a 5-4 margin. But between Charlie and Alice, Charlie is preferred over Alice by a 6-3 margin. If we draw out the graph, there is no source! We have a cycle of candidates, where Alice beats Bob who beats Charlie who beats Alice (much like a game of rock-paper-scissors). In this case, it looks like there’s no way to pick a winner.

To handle this, the Tideman algorithm must be careful to avoid creating cycles in the candidate graph. How does it do this? The algorithm locks in the strongest edges first, since those are arguably the most significant. In particular, the Tideman algorithm specifies that matchup edges should be “locked in” to the graph one at a time, based on the “strength” of the victory (the more people who prefer a candidate over their opponent, the stronger the victory). So long as the edge can be locked into the graph without creating a cycle, the edge is added; otherwise, the edge is ignored.

How would this work in the case of the votes above? Well, the biggest margin of victory for a pair is Alice beating Bob, since 7 voters prefer Alice over Bob (no other head-to-head matchup has a winner preferred by more than 7 voters). So the Alice-Bob arrow is locked into the graph first. The next biggest margin of victory is Charlie’s 6-3 victory over Alice, so that arrow is locked in next.

Next up is Bob’s 5-4 victory over Charlie. But notice: if we were to add an arrow from Bob to Charlie now, we would create a cycle! Since the graph can’t allow cycles, we should skip this edge, and not add it to the graph at all. If there were more arrows to consider, we would look to those next, but that was the last arrow, so the graph is complete.

This step-by-step process is shown below, with the final graph at right.

Based on the resulting graph, Charlie is the source (there’s no arrow pointing towards Charlie), so Charlie is declared the winner of this election.

Put more formally, the Tideman voting method consists of three parts:

• Tally: Once all of the voters have indicated all of their preferences, determine, for each pair of candidates, who the preferred candidate is and by what margin they are preferred.
• Sort: Sort the pairs of candidates in decreasing order of strength of victory, where strength of victory is defined to be the number of voters who prefer the preferred candidate.
• Lock: Starting with the strongest pair, go through the pairs of candidates in order and “lock in” each pair to the candidate graph, so long as locking in that pair does not create a cycle in the graph.

Once the graph is complete, the source of the graph (the one with no edges pointing towards it) is the winner!

Volume

Write a program to modify the volume of an audio file.

Implementation Details

Complete the implementation of volume.c, such that it changes the volume of a sound file by a given factor.

• The program accepts three command-line arguments: input represents the name of the original audio file, output represents the name of the new audio file that should be generated, and factor is the amount by which the volume of the original audio file should be scaled.
  • For example, if factor is 2.0, then your program should double the volume of the audio file in input and save the newly generated audio file in output.
• Your program should first read the header from the input file and write the header to the output file. Recall that this header is always exactly 44 bytes long.
  • Note that volume.c already defines a variable for you called HEADER_SIZE, equal to the number of bytes in the header.
• Your program should then read the rest of the data from the WAV file, one 16-bit (2-byte) sample at a time. Your program should multiply each sample by the factor and write the new sample to the output file.
  • You may assume that the WAV file will use 16-bit signed values as samples. In practice, WAV files can have varying numbers of bits per sample, but we’ll assume 16-bit samples for this lab.

Your program should behave per the examples below.

$ ./volume input.wav output.wav 2.0

When you listen to output.wav (as by control-clicking on output.wav in the file browser, choosing Download, and then opening the file in an audio player on your computer), it should be twice as loud as input.wav!

$ ./volume input.wav output.wav 0.5

When you listen to output.wav, it should be half as loud as input.wav!

READ MORE

For projects not documented above, kindly follow the link of your interest to know more about it:

• Filter Less
• Recover
• Inheritance
• Speller
• World Cup
• Mario
• Credit
• Readability
• DNA
• Songs
• Movies
• Fiftyville