(Almost) All The Algorithms You Need To Know For OCR A Level Computer Science

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

Third blog post in and for this one I am going to share my algorithm notes that are required for the Algorithms and Programming paper. I know I previously said I would share version 2 of "The Ultimate OCR A Level Computer Science Dictionary" but I realised I forgot to share "version 1.0" of my algorithm notes. 

These notes have all the algorithms that you need to be familiar with for the 2nd componont of the H046/H446 specification. I made these notes for memorising purposes however in the subject content clarification guide it does say that:

"we would recommend a general understanding backed up with practice implementing them, rather than trying to memorise code patterns."

This way is probably better but if you're in the same boat as me where you don't have a teacher and are self studying the A level then you may be better off trying to commit these algorithms to memory.

Another issue I came across while creating these notes is that the specification is very vague when it comes to the content you have to learn. For instance, instead of specifying which aspects of a topic you have to learn the spec will just state a key word such as "Standard algorithms". It doesn't mention if you have to know different variations of the algorithms or the Big O Notation/time and space complexities of the algorithms. It just mentions a single word and that's it. That's enough complaining from me now, let's get down to business. 

These notes contain 17 algorithms including:

1. Linear Search
2. Iterative Binary Search
3. Recursive Binary Search
4. Bubble Sort
5. Insertion Sort 
6. Merge Sort
7. Quick Sort
8. Dijkstra's Algorithm
9. A* Search Algorithm
10. Depth-first Graph Traversal
11. Breadth-first Graph Traversal
12. Algorithm For Outputting Linked List In Order
13. Algorithm For Searching Item in Linked List
14. Queue PUSH Operation
15. Queue POP Operation
16. Stack PUSH Operation
17. Stack POP Operation

As you probably have noticed, there are more algorithms for data structures mentioned in the spec but these ones were the only ones I could find via past papers and certain other resources which I will make another blog post about InShaAllah. All the searching, sorting and path finding algorithms are included. 

You may not even find this resource useful but nonetheless, I believe it's a concise list of (almost) all the algorithms mentioned in the spec all in a single document.

Here's the link: (Almost) All The Algorithms You Need To Know For OCR A Level Computer Science

Hope this helps!

P.S. I had to use Notepad to make these notes since indenting the algorithms was an absolute nightmare on Word. Apologies if this causes any inconveniences.