Linked List

Dear Blog,

Lately in CSC148, we have been learning about linked lists. We also just wrote the second mid term. I think the term test went pretty well. There was one question on the test that involved linked lists. I found the linked list material quite easy to grasp.

Linked lists are pretty interesting. It consists of black boxes that all point to another black box, and this is how they are all linked together. It is like a train of nodes. They are similar to trees in a way, but also very different. To go visit a specific node in a linked list, it seems that you have to start at the front and iterate through the entire linked list.

I don't know TOO much about linked lists yet. I still don't see the advantage to using them over regular lists, but I feel that when we start including recursion into linked lists, I will see the point. Here is a picture to illustrate the difference between a regular list and a linked list.

I will keep you updated on linked lists and everything else going on in this class.

Thanks,

J.M.

Assignment and Term Test #2

This week, my main focus was the second assignment, which was handing in two days ago, and it's now time to focus really hard on the second term test. My group and I thought the assignment would be really small and simple. We were right about one thing, it was small, but definitely not simple. We must have worked solely on the minimax strategy for roughly six hours. It was tough to wrap out heads around minimax strategy, but eventually we got it (I hope). After all that intense work, it turned out to be a measly 20 or so lines long.

Another focus this week is the 2nd term test. I am not too worried about the term test, even though it has been a bit of a confusing time, with the T.A. strike and not having labs. I have tried to work on the lab exercises by myself and with some friends, and after doing those and reviewing previous term tests, I am feeling pretty good about this term test. I think I will do pretty well!

Binary Trees

The slog entry I am choosing to be marked is titled "Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)"

Dear Blog,

This week, we focused on binary trees. I didn't have too much of a problem with recursion originally, but learning the recursive solution to binary tree problems is something I find quite difficult.

Something important about binary trees is that each "node" can only have at maximum two children. A node is any connecting point of the tree.

Above is an example of a basic binary tree.

There are also binary search trees which we just started learning about. The idea is that every left side of the node is lower and the right side is greater. This makes is easier to sort or search trees because it is much more efficient to ignore the parts we don't want or need. Here is an example of a binary search tree.

Notice how the left side of the node is lesser and the right side is greater.

Thanks for reading this week's post!
Sincerely,

J.M.