Week 8 recap!

Hey readers! This week has definitely been a stressful one, especially with the second assignment due and everything. It definitely was a lot harder to do than the first assignment. The first assignment, although the design of it was a something big, once we actually knew what we were fully doing it was pretty easy writing out the functions, especially since we dealt with how to implement certain things already in CSC108. This assignment was using a lot of the new concepts that we learnt which includes using recursion for the minimax strategy. That one took a really long time to figure out for my group because we had a hard time understanding how to keep track of all the scores and how to match it up with a certain game state. Took my group awhile but we got it eventually by creating a helper function to actually do the recursion part and return  the scores associated with each move.

Anyways, moving on to things we learnt in week 8! Week 8 we were introduced to the topic of linked lists. It's a linear sequence of nodes with a reference to the front or head. The back of the sequence is called the tail. The lab questions this week actually took me less time than last weeks. I'm a pretty visual learner so drawing out the linear sequence was a bit easier for me than picturing a big tree structure. Drawing out the linked list made things a lot easier since I knew exactly what I had to keep track of, especially in the last couple of functions where I had to keep track of 2 nodes rather than one, such as in insert_before. Overall the new material wasn't too challenging for me so I'm pretty confident in it, which is pretty great, since the test is next week. I can just focus on doing some practice for it. 

Also from last week, I ended up looking at some past tests in preparation for next week's test and to be a bit more familiar with some binary tree structures, and this has definitely helped me. It does really pay off to actually sit down and write the code out by hand since I end up being a lot more careful about what I write rather than just typing it up casually on Wing and making silly mistakes all the time. 

Anyways guys, that's all for this week's blog post! See you next week!