The Seven Week Itch

Ah, the week back from reading week -- so full of hope, anticipation, positivity. Until you realize that all the work you thought you caught up on was for naught -- there is a never-ending torrent of work to be done, especially in your computer science class.

Week 7 was devoted to finishing up the second assignment, which was not as easy as the first one. Assignment 2 is all about designing a game called Tippy, in which you play a game similar to tic-tac-toe, but instead of trying to get three in a row you try to place a tetromino somewhere on the board. Sounds easy, right? Maybe to play, and even maybe to code, but it's when you get down to the strategy that things get difficult.

In the first assignment, all we had to do was come up with a random strategy. In assignment two, we have to deal with a strategy called Minimax -- it can never lose, apparently! How are we supposed to write a program that can never lose, if we ourselves are always capable of losing? It was actually surprisingly simply, once you figured out everything that had to be done and applied the Tree methods we've been learning to your Minimax code. I won't post the details here, as the assignment hasn't been handed in yet, but needless to say I think I've learned a lot from writing the Minimax code.

Otherwise, week 7 sees things going as smoothly as ever in this computer science class -- classes are informative, labs teach me something new every time, and I'm genuinely enjoying the work that I'm doing. Binary trees are a good thing to learn, and I'm glad to have added them to my list of Python comprehension!