Another data structure!
Linked lists might not be a basic data type but they definitely have their advantages. The most annoying thing about them, I think, is that you have to travel through the list element by element to get to any value in the middle. But they do still form a nice chain-like structure that follows a concept similar to that of recursion, a concept of repetition. To get to any value you have to repeatedly go through all the values before it.
One thing that I realized for both linked lists and recursion is something that I found at the end of this guys/girls slog here:
http://1024forbidden.blogspot.ca/2015/03/week8-assignment2-about-recursion-and.html
i.e pictures help. A lot. Its easy to overlook this approach while solving recursion and linked list examples but I've found more often than not that explaining or understand something through a picture makes its so much easier to grasp.
That was one thing that I messed up on with the second assignment. I'm sure a lot of us were taken by surprise by minimax. I didn't think it would be that difficult so I procrastinated and left it till pretty much the last day. Which, of course, was the worst possible decision I could have made then. I also didn't draw pictures or try to understand the concept properly which in retrospect I should have done. But somehow, more than minimax, I found trouble coding the game state for tippy. I just could not understand how to store the data of a single game state in an accessible manner. I think I made minimax work by the end of it but our tippy game state was definitely a failure. But oh well, all we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on!
Here's to (hopefully) a better assignment 3.
Linked lists might not be a basic data type but they definitely have their advantages. The most annoying thing about them, I think, is that you have to travel through the list element by element to get to any value in the middle. But they do still form a nice chain-like structure that follows a concept similar to that of recursion, a concept of repetition. To get to any value you have to repeatedly go through all the values before it.
One thing that I realized for both linked lists and recursion is something that I found at the end of this guys/girls slog here:
http://1024forbidden.blogspot.ca/2015/03/week8-assignment2-about-recursion-and.html
i.e pictures help. A lot. Its easy to overlook this approach while solving recursion and linked list examples but I've found more often than not that explaining or understand something through a picture makes its so much easier to grasp.
That was one thing that I messed up on with the second assignment. I'm sure a lot of us were taken by surprise by minimax. I didn't think it would be that difficult so I procrastinated and left it till pretty much the last day. Which, of course, was the worst possible decision I could have made then. I also didn't draw pictures or try to understand the concept properly which in retrospect I should have done. But somehow, more than minimax, I found trouble coding the game state for tippy. I just could not understand how to store the data of a single game state in an accessible manner. I think I made minimax work by the end of it but our tippy game state was definitely a failure. But oh well, all we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on!
Here's to (hopefully) a better assignment 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment