Week 1 Day 5 - Painted into a corner

Today's partner: Connie

It's a bit of a challenge to reconstruct my memory of Friday after I failed to save my draft Friday evening, so excuse this entry for being perhaps a bit vague. Also, I'm going to speak in the tense I would have had I completed this entry Friday.

Today was the first day where there wasn't enough work to actually fill out the day. We had two main projects: a small class that built trees of moves for a Knight navigating a chessboard in order to find the shortest possible route between two points via knight's moves, and a Tic-Tac-Toe solving AI (on top of a couple small vignettes). Of course, the point of the AI wasn't to show any great details about AIs; rather, we were working more on Object Oriented programming, data structures, and algorithms.

These algorithms can broadly be called "paint bucket", or "flood fill" algorithms: starting at a point, do some action to all the "neighbors" (keep in mind that a knight's neighbors on a chessboard are moves of 1,2 away, and not adjacent squares - one of those mathematical things where you have to keep in mind the context you're dealing with), and then repeat for the neighbor's neighbors, ad nauseam until there are no more valid spaces to apply the action.

Doing this sort of naive AI over and over has certainly helped drive home how to best write recursive OO code to do breadth-first search in different contexts, with different types of objects, but again we're not making contest-winning AIs here.

Our biggest problem today was a weird edge case bug in the TTT AI. The spec was a bit hard to read, and once we nuked the half-dozen syntax errors in our collected source files, we found the logic as stated in English in the instructions to be a bit vague on what the various parameters means and how to pass them around. It took the better part of an hour or more to vary the code and make the lynchpin methods work properly, but once we got those right, the tests all passed without a hitch, and it was glorious.

Of course, at that point, we only had an hour left to work. Without a bonus problem to chew on, there wasn't much to be done except to dip our toes into this weekend's reading and talk about the course as a whole. I showed my partner a couple resources I had seen on using git, which I hope she found valuable, and then just chatted about stuff. I know I'll pay for it this weekend in terms of worktime lost, but sometimes you just need a break, you know?