Pruning and Course Content

    I am extremely excited to hear that, as of today, our TAs are finally off strike and we can all put our fears of changed marking schemes to rest. I find this especially relieving in working on assignment 3, knowing that it will indeed be marked at some point.

    More on assignment 3, I can finally say that I have successfully implemented each optimization for minimax and I couldn't be more excited. It took me several days of deep thought and nights of madly tapping at my keyboard to fully understand the pruning algorithm but at 3 am today, my hard work payed off. I'm certainly not done with commenting and cleaning up my code but I must say that this assignment has been the most effective exercise for my learning that I have completed in this course. I really felt that I could put everything we have been taught, as well as the problem solving skills developed in past labs and assignments, to good use in strengthening my Computer Science toolbox.

    With regards to course content I have not found ideas involving big-Oh to be very difficult so far, but deriving formulas for the number of steps executed in a function has always been my weakness. In order to combat this, I will be looking over my notes from CSC165 this weekend as well as completing Lab 10. Moving on, I have found our discussion on testing with assertions and unittest to be very useful in A3 in verifying the correctness of my strategies. I was able to extensively test StrategyMinimaxMemoize and StrategyMinimaxPrune with a heavily modified version of the test file we were given in the week 9 lab, but on second though it may have been a good exercise to write the file from scratch. I think after spending this weekend working on the small issues in understanding I have, my final week of this course will be exceptionally enjoyable as always.