Upgrade to remove ads
Only $35.99/year

AP Computer Science Principles Final Exam Review

Terms in this set (33)

Overflow
error that results when the number of bits is not enough to hold the number, like a car's odometer "rolling over"
Round-off
error that results when the number of bits is not enough to represent the actual number, like 3 digits to represent π as 3.14
Lossy
Compressing data in a way that throws some data away and makes it almost impossible to recover the original, great compression, like JPEG images
Lossless
Compressing data in a way that preserves all data away and allows full recovery of the original, good compression -- usually not as good as lossy, like PNG images
Metadata
data about data, like a camera storing the location, aperture, shutter speed, etc. for a digital photo
Sequencing
code flows line by line, one after another, like a recipe
Selection
a boolean condition to determine which of two algorithmic paths are taken, aka if-then
Iteration
using a looping control structure, like while, for, foreach, repeat, repeat-until, etc.
Reasonable time
polynomial in the number of steps an algorithm takes in the worst case based on the input size
Not reasonable time
Usually exponential in the number of steps, like doubling every time your input grows by one
Heuristic
using a "rule" to guide an algorithm, like always walking toward the north star if you were stuck in a forest
Undecidable
A problem that is so difficult, we can't ever create an algorithm that would be able to answer yes or no for all inputs, like determining if a user's program run on some input would always stop and not run forever
Linear vs binary search
Going one by one vs starting in the middle and going left/right like looking for a word in the dictionary -- binary search requires the list to be sorted in order
APIs
Application Programming Interface, how you define libraries and call them
Public key encryption
is any cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys which may be disseminated widely, and private keys which are known only to the owner.
Sets with similar terms