Blog Entry #1: Assignment #1

Blog Entry #1: Assignment #1

Assignment #1

        Personally I considered this assignment as a quite challenging project. To start with, it covered a lot of materials, such as class inheritance, creating an object, graphics, recursion, appropriate function calls...etc. It was also a fairly large assignment. Lots of new concepts were introduced, even with my prior knowledge and experience in the 3-Peg Tower of Hanoi, the solution to this advanced version still puzzled me. To solve a recursion problem, it requires a complete understanding of the algorithm and a clear method of approaches.  Another reason that I found this assignment challenging is that it provided parts of the solution and you had to solve the problem based on the codes given. The first 3 steps were all about understanding the given code and making a completion.  And eventually I realized that the first 3 steps were not hard at all, it just required you to patiently read each line of the code and really think through the role each piece of code plays in the solution. I found it helpful to write down what each function does in English to build a complete logic process first, and then translate it into computing language. Step 4 tour_of_four_stools is an application of recursion and it also seemed very challenging. It spent a lot of time on it because I misunderstood the question. After understanding the solving method in the instruction sheet and the clarification in class, I was able to code the program in a short period of time.
      Overall, I think this assignment was a great exercise. Like @duelistgamer's SLOG mentioned in his blog, this assignment requires a lot of work compared to the simple 3-peg tower of Honai. But It help me reviewed many concepts and logics in computer science by understanding other people's code and completing it. Another progress that I made was that I learned more about recursion and succeed in building a working recursive function on my own. I encountered many recursion problems in high school, but I never succeed in coding a somewhat advanced recursion problem on my own. And I'm very satisfied with the result. :)