Well, I finished the first lab of 6.009 and have uploaded it to my GitHub page. It passes all the test cases and seems to work as described in the assignment. Lab 2 is MUCH harder so far, I’ve been grappling with implementing the “Get_bacon_number” function. Essentially, we are provided with a large database of actors and movies ; the task is to find subsets of ‘bacon number n.’ Bacon number n is defined as follows: Every actor who has acted with Kevin Bacon in a movie is assigned a “Bacon number” of 1, every actor who acted with someone who acted with Kevin Bacon is given a “Bacon number” of 2, and so on. Kevin Bacon has Bacon number 0. Honestly, this is a lot harder than any of the other projects I’ve done so far and so I will probably spend the rest of the week completing it. Syntactically, there is nothing new or challenging here as the focus is on sets & dictionaries which I am comfortable with. Conceptually, it is more difficult than other projects I’ve done. I’m a little stuck on this project at the moment, so I’ve decided to pivot away from it and learn other topics in CS.
I watched the 3rd and 4th lectures for 6.006, and have done the first two parts of homework one. These are the easiest sections of the homework; all I had to do was rank in hierarchical order the time complexities of given )(n) expressions, and evaluate the O(n) time complexity of given recurrence relations. Nothing too bad, really.
I’m pausing on 6.005 for the moment, as the only reason I took that class up was because I couldn’t find 6.009 on OCW. Taking 6.006 and 6.009 concurrently will be rigorous enough and I hope to have completed both of these courses in the next 6-8 weeks (I’m being generous with my timeline here).
Spent some more time on leetcode solving mostly Binary Tree traversal problems. I feel it has given me a more solid understanding of recursion in general. All of the problems solved so far have been ‘easy’ but still challenging.
