CS371p Spring 2021 Entry 13: Dustan Helm
- What did you do this past week?
- I prepared my makefile and all the CPP files for Life but I haven’t gotten started actually coding an implementation because of the allure of procrastination. Additionally I attended office hours with my partner for Computer Graphics and got the penultimate project turned in.
- What’s in your way?
Myself.
- What will you do next week?
Work on P5: Life as well as my Graphics final project and Latin final project. Hopefully I don’t lose track of the week before I make too much project on Life. The number of files/classes and the hierarchy structure, though each of them is simple in isolation, has made it easy to put off.
- If you read it, what did you think of the What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You?
Did not read this week
- What was your experience of Life and inheritance? (this question will vary, week to week)
The Life assignment seems very similar to Darwin in the grid structure which implies to me that completely randomly generated test cases are going to be similarly unhelpful. As a result, when my implementation works I will likely try to make my acceptance tests all have a frequency of 1. I don’t exactly understand the exact semantics of the handler class, Cell, yet. I’m assuming we’ll probably have to do something like overriding the arrow operator for class Cell to access the contained AbstractCell pointer. My best idea for adapting the two pass solution with a neighbor grid is to use a vector<vector<pair<int, int>> in order to track one number of live cells under the FredkinCell neighbor schema and one number of live cells under the ConwayCell neighbor schema. Over all, inheritance is pretty straight forward but remembering what exactly is implicitly called by the compiler in each case is tricky and tripped me up on the quiz.
- What made you happy this week?
My best friend got vaccinated and moved back from Los Angeles for a while. He’s going to be moving somewhere else but for now we can hang out. I think we’re going to go see a movie or something and hang out tonight.
- What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is the fast inverse square root from Quake 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
If you’ve never heard of it, check it out. It’s magic
