Core: Linear Search, Part 1

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From the course by University of California San Diego

Object Oriented Programming in Java

2963 ratings

University of California San Diego

Object Oriented Programming in Java

2963 ratings

Course 3 of 4 in the Specialization Object Oriented Programming in Java

Welcome to our course on Object Oriented Programming in Java using data visualization. People come to this course with many different goals -- and we are really excited to work with all of you! Some of you want to be professional software developers, others want to improve your programming skills to implement that cool personal project that you’ve been thinking about, while others of you might not yet know why you’re here and are trying to figure out what this course is all about. This is an intermediate Java course. We recommend this course to learners who have previous experience in software development or a background in computer science. Our goal is that by the end of this course each and every one of you feels empowered to create a Java program that’s more advanced than any you have created in the past and that is personally interesting to you. In achieving this goal you will also learn the fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming, how to leverage the power of existing libraries, how to build graphical user interfaces, and how to use some core algorithms for searching and sorting data. And this course is project-based, so we’ll dive right into the project immediately! We are excited to be offering a unique course structure, designed to support learners of different backgrounds in succeeding at their own pace. The first module explains how this will work and if this course is right for you. We also recommend taking a few minutes to explore the course site. A good place to start is the navigation bar on the left. Click Course Content to see what material we’ll cover each week, as well preview the assignments you’ll need to complete to pass the course. Click Discussions to see forums where you can discuss the course material with fellow students taking the class. Be sure to introduce yourself to everyone in the Meet and Greet forum. This course should take about 6 weeks to complete. You can check out the recommended course schedule below to see a quick overview of the lessons and assignments you’ll complete each week. We’re excited you’re here learning with us. Let’s get started!

From the lesson

Searching and Sorting: From Code to Algorithms

You've come a long way in this course, and you've got a great project to show for it. In this last module we'll shift gears a bit to talk about some very exciting and fundamental algorithms for finding and sorting data in an array. Searching and sorting algorithms are not only fundamental to computer science, but also ideal for beginning to explore issues of algorithm efficiency. We will only begin to touch on issues of algorithm efficiency here. We will say much more about it in the next course in this specialization, so we hope you will continue with us. We'll also apply sorting to your project, and you'll wrap things up by finishing your project with an extension of your own choosing.

Core: Linear Search, Part 18:12

Core: Linear Search, Part 24:48

Core: Binary Search10:50

Core: Binary Search Example8:18

When I Struggled: Search0:47

Meet the Instructors

Mia Minnes
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Leo Porter
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Christine Alvarado
Associate Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

[MUSIC]

All right, in this lesson we're gonna learn some core algorithms for

searching for data.

Searching for data you probably do every day, many times a day.

And so we're gonna focus on some of the fundamentals of how to search for data and

how to do that quickly.

So by the end of this video,

you're going to be able to motivate why we want to search for data.

As well as to be able to write code to perform linear search, and

then we'll build on this in subsequent videos.

So let's start off with a motivating example.

Say I'm going on a trip, which I am.

I'm going on a trip and I wanna plan my airline travel, and in order to do so,

if you've booked airline tickets online,

you probably know that those airline ticket booking sites

use a three letter code for the airport that you're trying to book from.

So I'm coming from my hometown of San Diego and

I wanna figure out what is the three letter code for the airport in San Diego.

So there's a lot of ways I can find this information.

And probably one of the most popular ways is I can go to my favorite search engine

like Google and type in this query into Google and

Google will go off and search the information that's on the web

to find me a page that will hopefully answer my question.

Now, this is an example of search.

In fact an Internet search is a fairly complex search.

So there's a lot going on here in order to organize all the data and

return me results quickly.

Results that I find useful and so on and so forth.

So this kind of search is a little bit beyond the scope of this course.

But the idea is the same.

We have a big repository of data and I wanna find some information

in that data in order to answer some questions about it.

This is kind of fundamental to almost everything that we do in Computer Science.

So, let's simplify the problem slightly.

Instead of searching the entire Internet,

I'm gonna take a subset of the data on the Internet, a very small subset.

That I can find in a file called airports.dat,

which is on the website, whose url that you see here.

And, this file has information about,

almost, 7,000 different airports around the world.

And it's represented in terms of a number of different fields.

So each line in the file has a number of different comma separated fields.

Those fields include a unique ID inside this database, the name of the airport,

the name of the city that the airport is located in, the name of the country, and

that three letter airport code.

And a bunch of other information as well which you can find out by

going to that URL.

So I'm gonna be searching within this lesson in only this data,

not on the whole Internet.

So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to read in all of this data into my Java

program, and then I'll search for a particular city that I care about, in

order to find out some information about its airport, like its three letter code.

So here's the first step that I need in order to read in this data

into my program.

I need some way to represent this data.

So we know how to do that.

We know how to write classes and create instances of those classes, so

let's do that.

Let's write a class called Airport.

And it's going to have a field for

each piece of information we wanna represent about a particular airport.

In this case, we'll represent a city, a country, and that three-letter code,

as well as whatever information we want to keep about our airport.

Each of these fields is going to be private.

As I mentioned, a rule of thumb is to keep all of our data private, but

we'll provide getters, so we can access each of those pieces of information.

They'll get set in the constructor when I read in the data from this file.

And then I have access to all of these pieces of information for

each airport that's stored in my program.

So let's imagine that I've done that.

I've written some code that reads in this file that has all this information about

these airports into my Java program by creating

one instance of this airport class for each airport in that file.

I'm gonna simplify things a lot.

And I'm gonna imagine that my entire file only had eight airports in it.

So I'll read those all into,

each into an individual airport object which I'm going to store in an array.

So my array is going to be called airports.

It's an array of references to airport objects.

So one object for each airport.

And what's stored in the array again,

is a reference to this object which you see depicted here in the blue boxes.

And those objects exist somewhere in your computers memory, somewhere in the heap.

And again, what could store in the array is the references to those objects.

But this diagram is a little bit too complicated for my needs for this lesson.

So I'm gonna simplify things a little bit by writing all of the information from

each object directly in the box for the array itself.

So this is going to be my representation of the data that I've now read

into my computers memory from that big airports.dat file.

And again, there's a very simplified version for the purpose of illustration.

So now, I've got all the data about all my airports right into my array and now,

I can write a program to answer questions about the airports in that array.

And in order to answer a question about a particular city's airport,

I have to find that airport object first.

So, let's look at how to do that.

So let's say I'm looking for information about the Beijing airport.

And I wanna find out what is the three letter city code of that airport Beijing.

So, how am I gonna do this?

Well, first I need to find it.

One way I can do that is just basically by starting at the beginning of my array and

looking at each element in my array,

one after the next until I come across the airport I'm looking for.

Or I get to the end of my array and I haven't found it.

And that's an algorithm called Linear Search,

which we're going to look at right now.

The way it works, is I start at the beginning of my array, so

I start at index position zero, which is the fist index in my array.

And then I'm gonna look at the element in that index.

And I'm gonna ask is this a match for the thing that I'm looking for?

In this case I'll ask is the string to find which is the name of the city I'm

trying to find,

equal to the city field in the objects that's located in that array position?

And in this case I'll see that Montreal is city in the object at position zero and

Beijing is the city I'm looking for, those two strings are not the same, so

there's no match.

I'll go on to the next element in my array by incrementing index by one, so

now I look at the element in position one, is that a match?

Compare the cities, again I find that's not a match, so I'll continue.

Here's the index position two.

Match?

Nope. Still not a match.

Index position three.

Still not match.

Index position four.

Finally, I look index position four and I see that its city is Beijing,

which exactly matches the city that I'm looking for.

So now I've found the airport object in question.

And I can use it to answer the question of what is a three letter code for Beijing?

So I read that out of the entry and I can return it to my user.

So this is a match and we're done.

That in a nutshell is the algorithm called LinearSearch.

And here's how it looks like in Pseudocode.

So in the beginning we initialize the index variable to the start of our array,

and then we're gonna have a loop that keeps going as long as we haven't found

what we're looking for, in which case we'd just return it.

Or we get to the end of the array in which case we conclude that the element is not

in our array.

So while our index is not equal to the length of our array,

while it's less than the length of our array.

We'll look at the element in the particular position where index is

referencing, where index says we should look,

see if the city in that element matches the city we're trying to find.

If it does, we'll return the three-letter code, thus breaking the loop and

breaking the whole method, basically returning out of that method.

Otherwise we'll keep going by incrementing our index variable by one and

going back to the top of the loop.

When the loop ends we can conclude that the city we were looking for was not in

the array at all and we return some value to indicate that we didn't find it.

Okay.

So now it's your turn.

This is an interactive piece of the video.

I want you to pause the video.

And I want you to get out either a piece of paper and a pencil, or

better yet, just open up a clips and go ahead and write the code for

LinearSearch before you unpause the video.

Once you unpause the video, we'll go back over it.

But I really do want you to take a shot at going back to the algorithm that

you just saw, going back to the example and writing out this code.

See if you can do it.

I bet you can.

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