Crazy Programmin'
Hey there, I'm sooooo tired right now. If you remember last week, I mentioned that I finished my comp 282 program a week early. Well, to my dismay I found out on Monday that even though my program found the shortest path, it didn't implement A* using Dijkstra's algorithm. It was, instead, implementing A* with a Breadth First Search, however I thought it would be an easy fix because dijkstra's uses a priority queue rather than a Stack. So, I figured all I would have to do is edit my program to implement a priority queue. At the beginning of the week I had three midterms, and figured I'd wait to fix my program till wednesday night. Well, last night whilst trying to fix my program I ran into a major brick wall. While trying to fix my program, I realized how the design structure I had created was really only good for using stacks, and that making it with a priority queue was a pain in the neck to think about. So I ended up dumping the program and redesigning the whole thing from the ground up. I started the new design process around 9:30pm last night mapping stuff out on paper, and then once I got the ground work set it wasn't too hard to get back to where I was, which was trying to implement Dijkstra's. Around 12 midnight I ended up getting the thing to work, but not correctly. Around 1:30am I had tweaked out most of the bugs, and it seems to work flawlessly. I still have to put it through some major testing, but I think it's good to go. All I got left to do is print out the path, which is a walk in the park compared to redesigning the whole program.
All in all, I'm pretty happy that I scrapped the other program design, this one is much easier to think about, the old program was very abstract, and trying to explain it to people was hard. Plus this one has some pretty clever methods which, I wanted to implement in the program but couldn't due some constraints. I'm also glad that since my comp 222 professor pushed back the midterm to today, he also pushed back the C program a whole week as well, otherwise I'd be screwed, because I don't know C like I know java.
UPDATE::: Well I just checked my email, and I found out that I'm to receive the Computer Science Department's Silver Medallion Award. I'm happy hopefully if all goes well I'll be able to get gold next year. I'll be gettin my award at a special ceremony on October 29, 2004.
All in all, I'm pretty happy that I scrapped the other program design, this one is much easier to think about, the old program was very abstract, and trying to explain it to people was hard. Plus this one has some pretty clever methods which, I wanted to implement in the program but couldn't due some constraints. I'm also glad that since my comp 222 professor pushed back the midterm to today, he also pushed back the C program a whole week as well, otherwise I'd be screwed, because I don't know C like I know java.
UPDATE::: Well I just checked my email, and I found out that I'm to receive the Computer Science Department's Silver Medallion Award. I'm happy hopefully if all goes well I'll be able to get gold next year. I'll be gettin my award at a special ceremony on October 29, 2004.