I just started Masters on a different school than my bachelor degree and since Advanced algorithms is a compulsory subject and I never had Algo. for beginners, Im taking a bachelers level algorithms class, but it is in german. (I study my masters degree in english), therefore they just gave a book to read, some exercises to solve and then I can take the exam. Most of the exercises are about different algorithms and thats fine, but the first one is this 
Can anyone give me a hint how I can go about solving this? The book they gave me to read doesnt help at all.