[UmbertoNoEco]

they are not; this is classic hn posturing

at the veryleast this would belong to a second or third class of algorithms for ug( after the usual meat and potatoes: big,small o notation, searching and sorting, dp, greedy algorithms and so on) depending on the difficulty of the assignments this could be easily a graduate course

remember that no matter how difficult, obscure or new a technical field is you will have people here claiming they took a class about it as a freshman 10 years ago and they wrote some papers about it. sometimes it may be true, but most of the time it isnt