WEEK 8 - George, George, George of the jungle, watch out for that TREEE!

This week we talked about binary trees and binary search trees, which are like a regular tree, except each node can only have max two children (a left and right child node).
For binary search trees though, the exception is that: for every node, it's value is greater than all values in it's left subtree and less than all values in it's right subtree.

This is very interesting and we talked about the reasoning behind why BST's exist. They exist so that if you needed to search for a specific item in a tree, the search would be almost lightening quick as you could cut off several paths just by looking at their children no matter what their length is. This could then be applied into searching for a specific node in a tree, following the same parameters. I really enjoyed talking about the different ways of going through a tree and writing the methods in class. Having had the opportunity to write code for methods together really gave the opportunity for students to ask questions about why we did it the way we did, and help solidify the concept of BST's and their methods in my mind.

I'd also like to add that I'm currently very frustrated with A2. The minimax strategy is much harder then anything we've done before and so I'm feeling very angry at myself for not being able to understand it properly. Our team is completed almost everything else except for this and none of us have been able to get minimax to work properly. I suggested that we go into office hours at some point before the assignment is due because I think a explanation and clarification could really be helpful in nailing down this strategy.

Hopefully we figure it out on time before the assignment is due and we can submit everything early so we no longer have to worry about it. I really hope the instructors will be easier on the marking as I'm really noticing the lack of support from having the TA's to ask questions to.