CSC148 - Weekly Summary 2/17

Reading week is finally here! Before that, I was spending a lot of time on Assignment 1, the recursion tower of hanoi problem.

We were given an equation to determine the minimum number of moves for moving N number of cheeses from one stool to another. The equation was really hard to solve since there are  more than one variable. We also need to determine what the optimal value for 'i' is for different N values. I wasn't able to find a way to come up with the optimal 'i' value when the assignment is due, however I was able to finish the rest of the assignment.

My solution for the four stools method was able to significantly decrease the number of moves required in comparison to that of the three stools method. My insight was that as long as all four stools were utilized, the number of moves required should decrease. Therefore, I set "i" as (n // 2). The result was as expected and the number of moves required was drastically decreased. However, I realized that it is not the optimal solution and I'm looking forward to hear how my colleagues was able to solve it.

Overall, it was a great learning experience for me, especially from working through the problems alone.

CSC148 - Weekly Summary 2/8

Another week of computer science has gone by... here comes one more post to summarize the week!

In the lectures, we continued to learn more about recursions with the professor asking us to trace different recursions to increase our understanding. I noticed my improvements in the understanding of recursion with every exercise and lab that I had done.
In class, the professor also talked about the assignment that is due the coming week.

Although I clearly understand how the towers of hanoi recursion work in class, but I'm having trouble understanding what the assignment wants us to do. There are a lot of files with a vague instruction of the objects that we need to include under each class. I'll be utilizing Piazza more and see if I can get better at designing a program without clear cut instructions.

Hopefully I can get everything figured out before the due date!

CSC148 - Weekly Summary 1/31

I learned a lot since my last blog post. I was able to meet some peers and made some friends either in classes or labs. I was fortunate that people were really nice and patient, allowing me to ask numerous questions regarding recursion, subclass, etc.

I missed the introduction for recursion and was lost when I heard about it in the lectures this week, didn't know what recursion is. But with the help of my peer and some online research, I was able to learn that recursion is a function that calls itself. Although recursion is a really nice and efficient function, but it is really hard and complex to design. One main aspect of recursion is the base case, which allows the function to exit at some point.

 That's it for now! Will post a summary every week!

Object oriented programming & 1/20 Summary

In my first class of csc148, I learned that Python is infested by objects. Python is an object oriented programming language and is adept at handling large amount of data. We can use this object oriented programming to process data more easily and even to create new software.

Over the course of the first 2 weeks of classes, I have learned that you can design an exception type. It was noted that it is important not to alter a class after you published it to prevent inconsistencies from different versions. A good way to build on to it is to make a subclass of the old class to overcome this problem. With this method, the existing class object functions will be carried over.

In our class, people are actively participating in class discussions. The small classroom provides a really good learning environment.