I DID IT! (Week 8)

Last week brought great excitement for me because I was able to successfully code the lab's recursive code without too much trouble. Granted, it wasn't particularly difficult, but it was still a shining moment for me because of the difficulty that I've had with recursion. Both my understanding of how it works and my inability to come up with that additional required function to code it (minimax).

On the plus side, I think I'm getting better. And gradually realizing just how convinent it is to compared to non-recursive code. I was thinking as I wrote the code for the lab, that while some of the code could have been easier to write without recursion, it would have been longer and more unecessary. As Danny puts it, the code is deeper but significantly shorter, and intuitively it feels more effecient. I suppose I'll learn whether it is actually more effecient when we cover that unit in class.

What else did we do last week? Me and my partner started Assignment 2. I don't know how I feel about the fact that we're going to be spending hours (hours!) coding such a simple game; yes part of it is because we're using classes and recursion, and really the point is not the game. I just wish we had a little more that indicates the sheer amount of time this stuff requires. Hopefully future compsci courses will have something more satisfying (no offence to anyone who may be reading this!).

Otherwise though, this is proving to very difficult. Minimax is hard to wrap the mind around, let alone code, and reading the code for SubtractSquareState provided to us and comparing it to what we did on Assignment 1 is really a blow to the ego. But this is a learning process. Though I will say, I appreciate that there isn't one fixed way to do something and I feel validated in disagreeing with some of the more stylistic choices made by the professors. What I'm getting at is that I feel computer science and these assignments in particular involve quite a bit of individuality, and as a humanities-minded person, I greatly enjoy that.

That's all for now, folks!
- Anisha Rohra