PDSA Week 2 Graded Programming Assignment Solutions

📊 PDSA Week 2 Graded Programming Assignment (GrPA) Solutions

Version: v1_t12025_GradeBoost — Master Advanced Sorting, Binary Search Optimizations, and In-place Data Manipulation.

This downloadable solution provides complete, verified Python code for the Week 2 Graded Programming Assignment (GrPA). These solutions focus on algorithmic efficiency, demonstrating how to handle custom sorting criteria and optimize search operations in non-standard list structures.

Technical Problem Implementations

The solution features optimized Python functions for the following three major programming challenges:

• GrPA 1: combinationSort(strList) — Implementing a multi-level sort for strings containing letters and numbers. This solution manages stable sorting by character ascending while performing secondary numeric sorts in descending order, utilizing dictionary-based grouping and custom keys.
• GrPA 2: findLargest(L) — A high-efficiency implementation of Binary Search to find the maximum element in a rotated sorted list. The code is specifically optimized to avoid $O(n)$ slicing operations, ensuring a strictly logarithmic $O(\log n)$ time complexity.
• GrPA 3: mergeInPlace(A, B) — Mastering memory-efficient data structures by merging two sorted “MyList” objects without creating auxiliary lists. This implementation uses a custom swap method to maintain sorted order across two distinct objects simultaneously.