Algorithms Technology & Digital Applications 3

Question 1

A spam filter scores emails and marks those above a threshold as spam. Which algorithmic concept does this threshold represent?

Accepted Answer

Decision boundary

Answer

A decision boundary separates two classes (spam/not spam) based on a computed score, a core concept in classification algorithms.

Question 2

Version control systems like Git compute a compact fingerprint for each commit to detect changes. What is this fingerprint called?

Accepted Answer

Cryptographic hash

Answer

Git uses SHA-1/SHA-256 cryptographic hashes to uniquely identify each commit and detect any file corruption.

Question 3

A database executes a JOIN between two tables. Which algorithmic technique improves performance when both tables are already sorted on the join key?

Accepted Answer

Merge join

Answer

Merge join exploits sorted order to scan both tables linearly, achieving O(n + m) instead of O(n x m).

Question 4

A CDN caches only the most recently requested files and evicts the oldest when full. What cache eviction policy is this?

Accepted Answer

Least Recently Used (LRU)

Answer

LRU evicts the item that was least recently accessed, keeping hot content in cache.

Question 5

A file compression tool reduces a text file from 10 MB to 4 MB. Which algorithm likely achieves the best compression for natural-language text?

Accepted Answer

Huffman Coding

Answer

Huffman Coding assigns shorter bit codes to more frequent characters, efficiently compressing natural-language text.

Algorithms Practice Test