58

journal 58

Fly Doctor Art

I'm not sure exactly where it fits in to lecture but, algorithm-wise, any time you add print statements, especially in a loop or a double loop, algorithms go 1000x or a million x slower.

This week we learned about big theta, big omega, and learned how to get big O, big theta and omega from various functions. There was a pretty hard quiz with various algorithm interpretation and analysis questions and a question with a huge tree of choices I tried to solve with my AccountBlaster, which helped because AccountBlaster can enumerate a huge tree, but I'm still not sure if I got the question right. The tree seemed enormous, even for AccountBlaster, the question was a levels optimization question, like how few levels can you do something in, and it reminded me of a strategy optimization problem from gaming, like chess (actually the game reversi is what I've put a lot of though into lookahead, my robot B.H. Baby has I think a two-move lookahead optimizing for least-most move choices for the opponent, super confusing, right?). So my methodology for the quiz question I'm talking about was by using brute force and by hand enumerating each choice, using AccountBlaster to model all the choices. I don't think I got it right, but it was a very interesting question I enjoyed pondering and trying to solve. I have a bad feeling I'm missing a huge gotcha about that question, we'll see. And the homework assignments were very interesting, we had three mini-programs to write with three mini-algorithms to design ourselves, in either C++ or Java, for now mine are in Java, but I'm sure I'll go back later and try and solve them in C++ too, just for fun.