Week 9 has been a hectic week due to having a test in both CSC165 and CSC148 and the lack of TA support. Regarding the strike, I wish it was over since most of my knowledge of concepts and problem solving are cleared up during Tutorials and Lab Exercises. So, going to the two tests were filled with uncertainty with a lack of confidence of knowing these concepts. A lot more work had to be put into studying as self teaching was the key to get by this week and tests which greatly put me behind in other courses but hey! You have to do what you have to do and balance all of your courses.
Anyway, the test was not too bad. It was pretty straight forward and it's everything that we've seen before in class for sure. I noticed that I had made a mistake in the first question when they ask what is the biggest height a binary search tree could have with 20 nodes. To my understanding, I thought that each node had an arity of 2 which made me think that it had to either have no children or 2 children so I did not think of the possibility of the tree to be just one long path of 20 nodes. But now I am aware of my mistake and this possibility.
The recursion part was alright, It was to only list the even nodes in the tree from a certain interval if I remember correctly. So if the node was in the interval, you'd have to check the left tree and right tree and so on and create an if statement that only returns that node if " n % 2 == 0".
The linked list part of this test was some what challenging. But the handy dandy cheat sheet really came clutch (Urban Dictionary: the crucial moment that comes between winning and losing)! But obviously I was winning (maybe not, we'll see) because the code was pretty similar to the lab07 exercise when "delete_after" had to be implemented, if I'm not mistaken. You just had to manipulate the code a bit to get it to check the right conditions and to add the value of the next node to the current one then skip it. Just some minor changes to that code and bam you got it. If it isn't right...... well then.... part marks, am I right? Hahaha.
Overall, not such a bad test, we'll see about that though. Anyway, the last few weeks and the final push with no TA support to get through this semester and I am...... feeling...... indifferent about it. Like I want to finish the semester already and we're so close to the finish line but with no TA support, I don't know if i'll make it there, especially with no TA help with A3 and as the exam approaches to clear any misunderstandings and concept confusion with labs. But we got this! Work hard, Program Hard! :)
Yeah, I also got a bit confused by some of the terminology. But than again, the class didn't really cover difference between arity and branching factors. A branching factor is typically a constant which refers to the number of children of a node in a specific, tree like structure. Arity, on the other hand, is a really abstract term which refers to the amount of possibilities in a structure from any given point. In other words, its just a really broad way of saying "how many things can I do in this?" In the context of this class, I think it refers to the average branching factor (which would be the average amount of children every node has on the tree). At least, that's how the tutorial handout used the term. I hope that helps.
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