Week 4 has come and gone: The central topic this week was recursion. Though it was an overwhelming idea at first, there was one example that stood out amongst the rest in it's explanatory power: Thinking of a problem as a set of smaller but similar problems. Then, consider the subsets of the same problem within those subsets. You carry on this process until the base case is reached and then add everything together to solve the problem.
Working through some recursive examples was a bit difficult at first since I was treating every subset of the problem individually rather than seeing the same solution work for every subset and then ultimately culminate to the final solution.
All in all, recursion is definately a great addition to my 'programming toolbox' and I see many uses (both past and present) for it.
Speaking of present uses of recursion, the next topic of the week was Assignment 1.
A1 is based on the famous Towers of Hanoi problem. This assignment has us trying to move stacks of cheese with towers of hanoi-esque rules.
Though the assignment (currently working on it) seems quite challenging, I like seeing all that I've learned being put to use in one exercise.
I recognize that many aspects of the programming world emphasize teamwork and coordination, but I have decided to (for now) work alone. This will give me the oppurtunity to test my comprehension of learned topics in a rigourous way. Hopefully that will be good prep for the upcoming mid-term.
Well, that's all for this week - good luck to all on assignment 1!
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