Week 5 - More Recursion and Assignments!

This week in lecture and tutorial we covered more approaches to recursion. Recursion is a pretty complicated topic to understand, once understood you have to train your mind to think in that "recursive" term. This is something that's plagued me for 2 years (yes I started tackling recursion a mere 2 years ago). I've seen many people fail completely at recursion and those who get it in an instant. I've always leaned towards the failing end, although I would understand the reasoning behind it, I've never been able to code my ideas recursively. This week however I think I've achieved something great in my life because I've realized the secret to recursion and have demonstrated that in tutorial.

When taught recursion in lecture, Prof.Heap made it clear to think of the most simplest case and work up from there, using the values obtained previously to propel your examples further and further until you have a generalized formula. Now although this idea is relatively simplistic to understand, being able to combine this ideology with that of pythonic paradigms is yet another challenge. What I mean by this is list comprehensions. Thinking in terms of list comprehensions seemed like an impossible task when I was first introduced to it, all I could think of was "how did he think of this?". It wasn't until tutorial when I was faced with a similar problem that I was able to think like Prof.Heap and end up coding an example that he would have created himself. This was a moment in which I realized the secret to recursive programming, but much is still yet to be learned.

We have our first assignment due this week, an assignment I figured would be easy like CSC108's last semester. Boy was I Wrong. This assignment is the hardest assignment I've been given, why? Well, this assignment is based around solving a conjecture, something that no one in the world has created a definitive solution to. We are asked to provide a "good" approximation? This is a seemingly impossible task but a task we are forced to take on. I've tried many techniques of thinking of the problem and only have one issue which is how to switch between free stools, this is the trick to the problem but I have no idea how to do it with recursion. Previously I said that I now understood recursion, but I am still not a master at it since I cannot solve this problem.

In summary, this week has opened my mind to many new possibilities of programming, and has also humbled me with the task of attacking a conjecture.