Week 8: My Impressions of Week 7

Coming back from reading week, I definitely was not as focused and engaged as I should have been. A lot of things were on my mind, including the upcoming 2^nd assignment and the potential strike of the TAs, which ended up happening and is still going strong as of now. At first glance, the assignment seemed just as challenging as the first one, if not more. However, since we were given starter code for the game_state and substract_square_state, it was therefore not nearly as abstract in that we were told exactly the functions to implement. This game was a lot tougher than the subtract square game but it was manageable. Once I designed a working board-like structure crucial to the game play, implementing the rest of the functions that were concerned with applying move, returning the possible next moves, and announcing the winner was not a problem. It was fairly straight-forward to earn the 40% that was attached to the tippy game state, tippy game move, and the annotations to the game view in order to play tippy.

 I wish I could say the same for the minimax strategy we had to implement but it was a tall order. It tested us thoroughly on our ability to apply our knowledge of recursion in a game theory context. Minimax is a strategy designed to guarantee victory so long as the player using this theory goes first and there is infinite time and information to make decisions. The player envisions all possible moves from a game state and what outcome each move will lead to, through many more possible next moves. The base case for this recursion case is to check the outcome of the game state (i.e. a win, loss, or tie). If the base case is not reached, this means that there are legal moves available. The process now is to consider each available move and the game states that each move could lead to. From here, the player using minimax is to basically pick a move that would not lead to his or her loss. Our group needed to take our sweet time to discuss a game plan to write the code for it. I was not as involved in the process as my other teammates were because I was more focused on writing the code for the tippy game state. However, I had great teammates who were able to manifest our plan into a working code, so I am grateful for that.

Even in class, I could tell my classmates and even the instructor were pre-occupied with thinking about the assignment. I was glad the instructor spent a good amount of time explaining possibly confusing things about the assignments because otherwise we would have been somewhat lost. The classroom content involved binary trees, which I found to be a particular extension of the tree concepts so I did not find the material to be too much of a jump from the week before. What I need to do is catch up a bit on reviewing class notes because I have been neglecting them in favour of excelling on the assignment. The second test is coming up, which means I need to get studying. Fun.