Week #8-10 - Impressions of Week #7-9

In week 7 we began working with binary trees and binary search trees. This was an interesting continuation of what we had learned earlier regarding trees earlier. The other thing was the start of our working on Assignment 2, particularly minimax, which is probably one of the most complicated codes I've ever written for this class. It was definitely good to get an in depth explanation of what exactly it was supposed to do in class during this week, otherwise I might have been even more confused during the assignment. I also really like that we're starting to touch upon the realm of AI type codes, even this is obviously a hugely simplified version of it. It's just really cool to work on this code and think about how the base concepts might be built upon to work on really sophisticated programs later on.

Week 8 was the beginning of the strike, and as such the lack of tutorials and quizzes, which made it a little bit harder for me to keep on task and focus, I will admit. I am just glad that the labs for computer science are things we can work on at home, unlike for something like life sciences or physical sciences. We also started linked lists this week! One thing that I found a little hard to get used to was using a wrapper class, because I was used to only having a class for the nodes themselves, but after wrapping my head around the concept (pun fully intended), I realized that it's probably a much more efficient way to handle the concept.

This was also the week we finished working on Assignment 2, which was definitely harder than I expected! Shoutout to Dominique and Sophie, my wonderful lab partners for putting up with my perpetual lateness and inefficiency in writing minimax. Luckily the rest of the code wasn't super dependent on having that finished first. I ended up departing a little bit from how minimax was intended to be written. Specifically, having the scores multiplied by negative one through each level of the tree, to reflect that a win for one player was a loss for another. Because implementing it that way wasn't working out that well, what I did instead was keep the values the same, and have it from the perspective of a single player. Instead, I alternated using max and min to reflect that on either player's turn, they would make use of the best strategy available to them. I was a little wary of not doing it exactly the way the assignment expected, but when I talked to Danny during office hours, he seemed to think it was okay, so hopefully that's not something I lose marks on!

Week 9 was our second term test! I originally left the test thinking that I done really well on it, but looking back, I remember that was also the day I had to hand an essay for ENG237, and as that essay was worth 40% of my mark, I put a lot more effort into it than studying for the test, which I think reflected in my mark. The biggest mark loss I had on the test was actually from not reading the instructions properly, which is ironic because I was up late doing literature analysis. The other mark loss is something I'd like to get re-marked though, since I wasn't sure if the comment said "front case" or "float case", but either of those cases should have already been handled.