My courSe bLOG

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The Last Slog Week 10 (Apr. 9, 2016)

With the end of the 12th week of lecture, we wrapped up our time in csc148 by discussing and implementing hash tables. As seen in our second assignment, abstract data types that use hash tables such as dictionaries are much more efficient when searching for values compared to lists. Rather than searching through an entire list to find a value, hash tables allow you to quickly access it through its key. However, due to the "Birthday Paradox", chaining or probing must be used when hashing values into keys to prevent keys from having the same index. Overall I find hash tables a great way to reduce run time when searching through a list of values.

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Blast From the Past Week 9 (Mar. 30, 2016)

It was five weeks ago when we were first introduced to the concept of recursion. Carefully packaged and presented as not some magical structure, but a tool that could be understood and utilized. As stated in Week 4's Slog, my initial impression of recursion was that I found it difficult to implement, however, on a conceptual level, I understood how it worked. As I gained more experience creating recursive functions, I developed a better understanding on how to structure them with base cases and general cases. I find myself capable of identifying the simplest case of a recursive function and performing traces on them with relative ease. What I find more difficult is having an intuitive sense of how to implement the general cases. This process usually requires more thought and time for my mind to wrap around it. As I find with most things in life, the more you know about something, the more you find yourself lacking in that very topic. Overall I believe I need to develop more of an intuitive sense on how it works by implementing more of them.

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Week 8 (Mar. 27, 2016)

During this week of lecture, we examined the use of dictionaries to store the values of recursive functions at each level, increasing the allocation of stack space for and the Big O notation.

When using recursion to calculate data based on the previous stack of calculation, the function normally must recalculate the previous stack using recursion. This process is redundant as that previous value has already been calculated, so to prevent this unnecessary calculation, a dictionary can be used to store the value calculated at the previous stack and used in the current stack to make a calculation. Due to limited support of recursion in Python, users must explicitly tell Python to increase the allocation of stack space to allow for more recursive calls. Without this explicit command, Python will run out of stack space for recursive calls that require many calls. We also took a look at the Big O notation and how runtime is affected by increases in the size of data. It is used to compare how functions scale with increases in data dependant of the system doing the process, and focuses on the efficiency of the function.

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Week 7 (Mar. 19, 2015)

During this week’s classes, we took a look at a function to delete the nodes of a binary search tree and had our second term test. This function was slightly tricky to implement as the order of a binary search tree must be maintained properly even after removing the nodes. The second test focused more heavily on the implementation of functions and as a result I found it to have a lighter time restraint compared to the last test.

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Two Week 6 (Mar. 12, 2016)

In this week’s class, we looked at Trees with only two deadly children, aptly named left child and a right child. We were able to use this ADT to express arithmetic expressions and examine binary tree search which has ordering conditions. The concept of binary tree searches interested me the most this week as it reduces the amount of comparisons to at most log(n), a tool that will prove much more efficient compared to linear searches.

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Back Again Week 5 (Mar. 3, 2016)

During the past week of classes, we looked deeper into recursion in order to implement functions for a Tree. Recursion, the concept of a function calling itself was used to go deeper into the branches of a tree, the children, in order to find out things like the depth of the tree or the number of leaves.

The main structure of recursion consists of a base case, and a general case. In order to be implemented correctly, the base case, the simplest form of the problem being solved must exist and returns a value without depending on recursion. The general case breaks down the problem into smaller pieces, calling on itself until the base case is reached.

Recursion is a very useful concept because of how simple it allows the implementation of a function to be. Trying to implement a function iteratively instead may be much more complex and require more lines of code. In conclusion, I find that recursion is an important concept to learn, albeit hard to understand.

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Looper - Week 4 (Feb. 27, 2016)

During the sixth week of class, we learned about the concept of recursion, tracing several examples of its use to get familiar with it. Recursion allows programmers to greatly simplify the body of a function by having it call on itself. Having learned about recursion before, I did not have too much trouble understanding it this time around. Although I find it a tricky concept to grasp, I believe it is a very beneficial tool to use. 

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The Slog Strikes Back - Week 3 (Feb. 12, 2016)

This was the fifth week of class and we were hit with a mid-term test and the implementation of the abstract data types stack and queue using linked list. In terms of the test, I found the most difficult element of writing it to be the time constraint. The sheer magnitude of writing required for the docstrings put a heavy strain on the time available for constructing the code and subsequently completing the questions. On a different note, I found the comparison in efficiencies between stacks and queues implemented using lists compared to linked list very interesting. This is a topic I am eager to learn more about in the future.

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A New Slog - Week 2 (Feb. 6, 2016)

With the conclusion of the fourth week of class, a new data structure was added into our computer programming repertoire, the linked list. Using lists to link together nodes through references, we were able to create our own linked list of nodes. As a concept I had barely touched in the past, the implementation of its class was of particular interest to me and I am excited to be able to implement it into my future projects.

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The First Slog - Introduction

Hello and welcome to the first blog of my life. This course blog will attempt to encapsulate my experiences in python as I develop a skillset that can be applied to computer programming in general.

During the first three weeks of lecture, we were introduced to the concepts of class importation, the writing structure of class APIs, inheritance, and abstract data types such as stacks. Along the way we learned how to override built-in methods as well as superclass methods to create new behaviours. Overall these new concepts were quite interesting and I am excited to be able to practice implementing them in the upcoming assignment. This is a task I am definitely preparing for and will be allocating an adequate amount of the time to successfully complete it.