Livin' the SLOG Life

Hello my lovely lovely readers! This will be my concluding post for the course! (unless I fail this course, which I really am hoping will not happen...) Today I would just like to recount my experience throughout this course, which I would say was overall pretty bomb-tastic (my awkward way of saying this was a good time). The course was interesting, challenging, and above all a great learning experience. I felt like the little taste of different data structures and recursive coding is a great start to the rest of my time in the computer science department.  During this semester I definitely encountered a myriad of problems and conceptual dead-ends that I was luckily able to get through. Trees, recursive coding, linked lists, they were all a step above the level of thought that needed to go into the coding from CSC108. Every lab was a bit of a challenge, but in a good way. It kept me on top of my game and constantly reviewing 148 concepts (I can't say that I did the same for m...

Hello friends!! How do you do today? Week 11 has just happened and boy did this semester go by quickly. For this week's post, I would like to talk about tracing recursion (or rather recursion, in general), which I talked about in my  week 5 post .  Ah... good ol' recursion. In week 5 we were only responsible for tracing, and without having to code. Back then I thought coding recursive functions was something that I could handle. Now, 6 weeks later, my much older, wiser self agrees, somewhat. Firstly, I would like to say that I am not the hardest worker, nor am I the smartest cookie in the cookie jar. However, I can usually understand something the first time someone explains something to me. With recursion, that was definitely  not the case. It took so much time and way more effort than I thought to understand. The 'recursive thinking' definitely does not come innately to me. With that said, it is not like organic chemistry (which is my personal kryptonite) so I was...

Hello my dear readers! Last week in lecture, we talked about binary search trees (BST) and it was... really cool!  http://www.jade-cheng.com/uh/ta/ics-211-spring-2010/faq/bst.png A binary search tree, when populated with numbers, or anything that can be ordered really, is extremely easy to traverse and find what you need. That's because all the nodes are organized when put into the tree. In the tree displayed above, 20 is the root of this BST. This root has 2 children, 10 and 30. Note that 10 is on the left of 20 and 30 is to the right of 20. This is really important because that is how the tree is organized. If you keep looking at the children of 10 and 30, you'll notice that all nodes left of 10 and 30 are less than the respective nodes and anything to the right would be greater. This makes traversal amazingly quick and efficient.  The lab for that week was on BST insertion and deletion which was quite straight forward since we have learned about trees befo...

Hello readers!! How are you all feeling today? Week 9 has just ended and boy was that test a doozy. A lot of material was included but not much was tested, which made making the cheat sheet a strategic nightmare. Jokes aside, that test was quite fair and I felt that if I studied the labs and lecture material in a greater depth I would have been much more successful.  Last week we learned a little bit about linked lists and it was pretty interesting. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/CPT-LinkedLists-addingnode.svg/474px-CPT-LinkedLists-addingnode.svg.png So. Linked lists, they're a nifty little data structure. Just like binary trees and the like a linked list is really just another way to organize data. If you would like to read up on the specifics on linked lists, take a look at  this week's reading . Linked lists are a useful because it allows us to insert and delete nodes (the data) between other nodes without recopying the whole list...

Hello readers!!! Last week  we learned all about Binary Trees and finally handed in the ever confusing Assignment 2 (I would not like to relive that recursive mayhem that was Minimax). Would you like to know about binary trees? Well too bad, regardless of your answer, I will be talking about it anyways. (if you do need a bit of a pick-me-up though I would recommend listening to  this song  while you're reading; this one always makes me feel happier!) Now back to binary trees. Binary trees are a special type of tree where each node has a maximum of 2 children. Simple as that! The difference with this tree is that it can come with a left and a right feature where you can specify which of the children you would like to call. With lab 6 came a massive list of functions we could create for a binary tree. It was quite complicated as I am still not completely used to coding recursively. While I am not the best at this new and cool data structure, I am really excited to be ...

Good morning readers! I hope you all have had a wonderful week back from reading week! I had 2 midterms, so that was fun, but I'm hoping that at least some of you who are reading this had an actual fun week back! Now for this week, our assigned topic is a choice between object oriented programming, recursion, and abstract data types. Coincidentally, I have written a little bit about object oriented programming in Week 6 ! So for this week I shall just direct you back a week. Have an awesome week and good luck on assignment 2 guys! Lana :)

Hey y'all! Week 6 of class has come to the end and it is time for me to write yet another delightful post. I hope all of you had a wonderful Valentine's Day! I for one went to see a light hearted play about zombies at Hart House. It was fantastic, if you were wondering. This week is all about object oriented programming!!! Woot! (*searches on Google to find an exact definition of said topic*) ...Ok I'm back! So object oriented programming! It's something we've all seen before when we first learned how to make classes, with an added bonus of making subclasses with inheritance.  The premise is quite simple; you want to create a general class for whatever you would like to code, and then when you want to make a specific version of it you'll make a subclass. The subclass should logically be able to have whatever cool features you've made for that class (called inheritance).  Let me give an example: so let's say you would like to create a general clas...

Hello readers! How have you guys been recently? I have been bombarded with a myriad of tests, labs, and assignments, as usual, but I'll holding up alright! Today's blurb is on tracing recursion! As you all know, a recursive function is basically any function that is called within itself. You'll need it any time a bigger problem can be solved by solving smaller versions of a same type of problem until you get your answer to the big one. Kind of. At least that's how I see it. Anyhow, tracing recursion is not as bad as it sounds, it takes some bit of practice, of course, but all in all it will eventually click. Tracing recursion was on the test this week went successfully I should think. The quasi-solution I came out with with involved the function we needed to trace giving the maximum length of any lists that were fed into it, including the length of the overall list. If I am correct, then my tracing would have been successful. We shall see in due time! Bu...

Hello readers! I hope your week has been going well so far! The weather recently has been fluctuating from skin hardening cold to mild shivering cold and back, so I hope none of you have gotten sick! Stay warm, kids. So today I'd like to just talk about my experience in CSC148 these past few weeks, and boy have they been hectic. It's not all because of this course, it's just that my multiple weekly quizzes and assignments, compounded with life science labs and work-study has really been keeping me very busy. (If any of you are interested in the bioinformatics specialist, let me tell ya, it's actually a pretty intense workload due to the spread of different styles of courses you need to take) The first few weeks were kind of an intensive review of creating our own classes, along with the teaching of inheritance and the completion of our first assignment. The first assignment was very difficult to synthesize at first, due to my own inability to not understand ...

What's up, readers? So the 3rd week of classes have flown by and I already feel 30 years older. What is with second semester? Always hits me like a train. Anyways, let us move on to the topic of the week: 'Should Geeks Write?' Before I start off the piece today, I'd like to say that I am a science student (a subclass of this type of student, if you will), and I have inherited many of the 'typical' science student traits, one of them being the complete reluctance to write any formal essays or letters of the sort. Sometimes it gets to a point where just thinking about having to write another cover letter or report becomes anxiety-inducing and nauseating. However, with that being said, I am still 100% in favour of more 'geeks' writing and at least learning how to formulate a coherent idea. First off, what is a 'geek' anyway? When you kind of strip away any eccentric behaviour or questionable fashion sense, really, a 'geek' is jus...

Greetings my fellow sloggers (or non-sloggers), This is the second instalment of my blog, where I recount my thoughts and feelings of my current computer science course. This time, it's CSC148, which is simply named, 'Computer Science.' There will be more updates to come, I assure you. Toode-loo! Lana :D