Although I have spent much of this semester re-reading my old posts to assess my growth as a computer scientist, I find this post to be especially important to reflect on. While recursion is still my favorite computer science concept to date, I think that at the time of this post I didn't have as much of a solid grasp on this concept as I believed I did. Certainly working on minimax helped my understanding tremendously but I do not believe that I was truly comfortable with using recursion until much later when I had more practice. Furthermore, I think my frustration with binary search trees noted in the end of my post was simply a symptom of this uncomfortably which became clear to me after looking over my code again as I had suggested I might. Working on option A of Assignment 3 was a far greater challenge and really solidified the idea of using recursion just as any other computer science tool that I have learned to date. After pouring over pruning for several hours and completing myopic and memoization in minutes, as noted in a previous post, I can now confidently say that I both understand and am very confident in my writing of recursive functions.
Despite my slight hurdle with recursion, I found this course to be relatively straight forward conceptually. Assignments 2 and 3 were definitely challenging but they were very effective in pushing us to become stronger problem solvers; I enjoyed every minute of working on them. This will be my final post regarding CSC148 so I would like to take a moment to thank all of the TAs, instructors, and fellow students for the amount of support given to me throughout the course. You all contributed to a fantastic semester studying CS!
In addition, these slogs were especially helpful and interesting:
Sam
https://csc148winter2015.wordpress.com/
Monica
Note to my TA: I was unaware that this post was to be made last week. I did post last week, just not about the assigned topic so I would like this to be marked as my Week 11 Revisit post if possible.
Thanks for the compliment! Your blog was fun to read over the course of the semester :P
ReplyDeleteYes, I definitely agree with you in that minimax did solidify some understanding of recursion, but I think as the deadline for A2 was fast approaching, I became more interested in getting minimax to work, which meant that I didn't go through writing the code with a purpose, but rather I tried different combinations of code until my solution worked.
So .... really, my solution didn't really demonstrate any full understanding of recursion since it was more like a duct-tape solution.
When completing A3, though....I knew which steps needed to be taken (i.e. identify base cases, traverse through tree), and I feel much more comfortable with recursion.
Good luck with your exams!
Thanks, you too!
DeleteThanks for the mention! I'm glad you found my blog helpful! Your blog has helped me and other people with the lab exercises and I enjoyed reading your posts. :)
ReplyDeleteI used to think I understood recursion fairly well until recently. But after lots of exposure to it, especially in A3 Option B, I think I'm getting a little better at it. As well, as you have said, CSC148 is straightforward conceptually. There were times when I didn't do as well as I'd expected, but I learned from there.
I hope you do well on the exam!!
I'm very glad to here that I could help :) Good luck to you too!!
DeleteNoted:-)
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed reading your SLOG. Wonderful job!
-- Your TA.
Thank you :)
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