The First Acquaintance Of Schoolchildren With Hard Programming Problems

We consider the material of the elective course for the young students, and briefly describe both so-called hard problems and some methods necessary to develop programs for their implementation on the computer. For this, we are considering several real problems of discrete optimization. For each of them we consider both “greedy” algorithms and more complex approaches. The latter are, first of all, are considered in the description of concepts, understandable to “advanced” young students and necessary for the subsequent program implementation of the branches and bounds method and some associated heuristic algorithms. According to the authors, all this “within reasonable limits” is available for “advanced” young students of 14–15 years. Thus, we present our view on the consideration of difficult problems and possible approaches to their algorithmization – at a level “somewhat higher than the popular science”, but “somewhat less than scientific”. And for this, the paper formulates the starting concepts which allows one of such “complications” to be carried out within the next half-year. This paper can be considered as a popular scientific presentation of algorithms necessary for advanced programmers to solve complex search problems. We consider the material of the elective course for the schoolchildren (young students), and briefly describe both so-called hard problems and some methods necessary to develop programs for their implementation on the computer.