It is 12:03 am on October 19th, and exercise 4 has forced to to admit defeat. Based on the past 6.5 hours of my life, I am able to ascertain that the best way to make me feel really dumb really fast is to present me with anything that is nested/recursive. On one hand, I have learned a lot about binary trees, understand them and can manually transverse them with extraordinary ease, and can impress my family with really smart-sounding terminology and explanations. On the other hand, I want to rip all my hair out and fall into a ball because that was the most stressful 6.5 hours I've had in a while, and my solution for part b still doesn't work (and even though there's 20 minutes left before markus actually takes it as late work, I'm so absolutely upset and tired over this whole ordeal, that I just don't care, I absolute cannot right now)
On a kind of nicer note, the midterm earlier this week wasn't bad at all, the most worrying thing about it being that I think I may have misinterpreted one of the questions, because in hindsight, I wrote about 1 line of code for a 15 mark question, and I really question why I thought that was an okay thing to do at the time of the test. So I'm anxious to get the mark for it back, but that's alright, I'm not too concerned because I'm too busy being concerned about midterms that I haven't written yet.
All in all, I learned lots about computer science stuff this week thanks to studying and the 6.5 hour exercise 4 induced hell I just endured, so it was an educational week for the subject despite not having any class, and the CDF labs being down during my tutorial. I hope I never have to use this stuff again (which I know I will, the struggles of comp sci).
UPDATE October 22nd:
Disregard any confession to failure/defeat above, apparently the brute force desperately applied to part b of the exercise managed to succeed for all but one test case, and I'm a python god.
Evidently, you gave a very thoughful one-line answer and aced the question. That's how recursion is *supposed* to go. My solution was also a one-liner, and I gave myself high marks for it...
ReplyDeleteI feel badly about the hair-tearing part. I am, at times, willing to give hints to get students point in the right (recursive) direction.
Thanks, Danny; after getting the first test back, I'm a little better at believing in my ability to solve recursive problems. I'll have to get a little better at working on the exercises before Friday so I can come see you pre-hair-tearing!
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