Dec 6 2013

Well, this is the last post which I will be giving in this course, so I will really make an effort to write this well.
I have done a lot of practice during this week in terms of recursion. The focus of my study is mostly on the problems which I was unable to solve before midterm 2. Before this week, my Impression about recursion on trees is mostly based on the understanding of list concatenation. During this week, I have learned how to truly handle the combinatorial nature of trees by assigning variables to the recursive calls and perform functions on these calls. With this technique, I was able to solve many hard problems such as finding the max element in a Binary Tree and looking for a path to the minimum value.  Here is a program which I have wrote that handles one of those problems

def max_val(BT):
    if not BT:
        return 0
    else:
        left_max = max_val(BT.left)
        right_max = max_val(BT.right)
    return max(BT.data, left_max, right_max)

As we can see, it does not involved any list comprehensions or concatenation but it is a very straight forward program that solves a problem that would otherwise be very difficult.

Now to sum up this course. In general, I have greatly benefitted from the material in this course. Especially the fact that although there is no text-book, there is a common theme that runs across the entire course. I loved the material about recursion and how it can be applied to solve a wide range of problems. Since this is the first computer science course ever in my life, I am rather satisfied with what I am able to achieve throughout this course. Although there are times which I find the course difficult, and there are times which I have to spend hours trying to solve a problem. But in return I can say that I have acquired a solid foundation in computer science. Comparing with the other courses which I have taken so far, this area is certainly a breath of fresh air.

Well that is pretty much it, I am certain that everyone have enjoyed this course as much as I did and I hope everyone have a successful exam on Tuesday.