7 Oct – 13 Oct

What did you do this past week?

This week me and my partner set up the GitLab repo (though she doesn’t have permission to push into the master branch. I’ll need to figure out why.), implemented the methods of the two iterator classes (which, by the way, person reading this, did he ever say why we need an iterator for an allocator? You don’t use it internally, since it has to skip ahead to the sentinel positions, and the iterator doesn’t have an operation to do that. And we would never want to encourage a user to just iterate through your heap memory. I mean, maybe you want them to be able to iterate through a data structure that they put into your heap, but they should just use the iterator given by the data structure, like how vector has vector::iterator. Leave your thoughts in your comment. Or don’t. You do you.), and implemented the allocate method. We also made some unit tests to make sure that our allocate method at least partially works.

What’s in your way?

We still need to implement the deallocate method, then do all the unit tests and acceptance tests, the issues, the doxy rigmarole. We are prairie nomads traveling West. The only thing standing in our way is distance.

What will you do next week?

First we’ll implement the deallocate method, then push our code through HackerRank. Then we’ll do all the… wait. How will we input the data into the program? Was that code provided?… Oh God it wasn’t. Hmm… Maybe we can modify the read method from our voting code. Are we allowed to do that? I think we’re allowed to do that. That’s probably what we’ll do.

What was your experience of peer-instruction quizzes? (this question will vary, week to week)

I wonder when we’ll figure out that one person can go up to the chalk board, ask what the popular answer is, write it on the chalk board, and then maybe ask for an explanation if time allows. Make the thing into an organized forum, rather than just a bunch of people talking and potentially not hearing the right answer. I wonder if that’s still in the spirit of the quiz format.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Over the summer I spent some time trying to make a reinforcement neural network. I used this paper to learn how to do it (you probably only need to read the methods section, especially the algorithm outline, and maybe some of the hyper-parameter table). I also used this python tutorial for some insight into the implementation, and this extremely awesome webpage to understand how RMSProp worked, as well as some other ML optimizations like Momentum. Be warned, this is a little more advanced than your basic neural network, so if you don’t know much about ML, I’d start off with these videos by the amazing 3Blue1Brown.