Assignment 1 Feedback (Week of Oct 14th)

I took almost the whole weekend last week to finish Assignment1! But I felt really accomplished when seeing the animation work! Completing part 1 and 2 wasn't too hard, because you just have to store instance variable to a class and write methods header. Part 3 was a bit annoying because I need to first understand what each method in DomainStools does in the ManuelController class, then implementing it. The method 'add' and 'move' took me around 2 hours to finish. At first, I did not understand what ‘add’ does because DomainStools has nothing to do with graphics of the cheese or the canvas. After a while, I realized it is used for restricting which cheese you can move. For method 'move', I had problem distinguishing the bottom cheese (stool) because they all have the same size. Thus by just checking the size of the bottom cheese, I cannot tell which stool is the cheese on. To get around it, I added another attribute onto class Cheese, which tells me the stool it is on when added on the stool (method 'add').

Part 4 took me around the whole night to finish. I took a long time writing a method that finds the optimal split for the cheeses. I believe my method optimal_split was not the most efficient, but as long as it works, I am satisfied. I am really thankful that Professor Heap sent us the method for moving cheeses using three stools. I just modified his code so that it can solve the 'tour of four stools' problem. 

Part 5 was relatively easy compare to part 3 and 4. I just had to implement the animation by modifying the code in ManuelController. It only took me an hour to finish it. In general, this assignment was a pretty good experience in working on graphics and recursion.