Due Friday, October 9 at 11:59 pm Pacific
- Submissions received by due date receive a small on-time bonus.
- All students are granted a pre-approved extension or "grace period" of 48 hours after the due date. Late submissions are accepted during the grace period with no penalty.
- The grace period expires Sun, Oct 11 at 11:59 pm Pacific, after which we cannot accept further late submissions.
- In this course, we express all date/times in Pacific time GMT -7. Our Paperless submission system also displays/records due dates and submission times in Pacific time.
Recursion is a powerful problem-solving tool with many practical applications. This week's assignment is a recursion "sampler" that introduces recursive problem-solving through several small, independent tasks. Learning to solve problems recursively can be challenging, especially at first. We think it's best to practice in isolation before adding the complexity of integrating recursion into a larger program. We'll get to that in future assignments!
Most students find that it takes some time to get comfortable thinking recursively. We recommend that you start the assignment early. Read over the problem statements today and get your brain starting to mull it over. There is not a large amount of code for you to write, but you want to give yourself plenty of time to wrap your head around this new way of solving problems. And while that beautiful recursive solution may be only a few elegant lines, you'll work hard on each line. Recursive code can be dense and complex and requires your full attention to get the details just right.
Dedicate yourself to deeply assimilating the foundation concepts within the context of these small, targeted problems. Lecture will continue on to explore more advanced applications of recursion. By next week, you'll be in prime shape to tackle recursive solutions for even more impressive problems.
This assignment is to be completed individually. Working in pairs/groups is not permitted.
Learning goals
After completing this assignment, you will be able toā¦
- Break down a problem into a collection of smaller, self-similar tasks.
- Develop a recursive algorithm by dividing a problem into one or more base cases and one or more recursive cases.
- Understand and trace execution through recursive function calls.
- Apply techniques for testing and debugging recursive functions.
Assignment parts
This assignment consists of a short warmup exercise and four recursive functions.
-
Warmup
Practice with unit tests and debugging on recursive functions.
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Balanced
Determine whether an expression has properly matched pairs of bracketing characters.
-
Karel GPS
Help Karel find the way home by counting possible routes to the origin.
-
Sierpinski Fractal
Draw a beautiful self-similar fractal triangle.
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Merging Sorted Sequences
Implement an efficient divide-and-conquer algorithm for merging a collection of sorted sequences.
Getting started
We provide a ZIP of the starter project. Download the zip, extract the files, and open the .pro file in Qt Creator.
š¦ Starter code
The source files you will edit are warmup.cpp
, balanced.cpp
, karel.cpp
, sierpinksi.cpp
, and merge.cpp
Additionally, you will answer questions in short_answer.txt
.
Resources
Here are some resources that you might find helpful for this assignment:
- The Assignment 3 YEAH Session is scheduled for Sun Oct 4th at 12 noon Pacific. Zoom information can be found on the Zoom Information page. Come join the party!
- Trip's Assignment 3 YEAH slides
- The CS106B Guide to Testing
- The CS106B Style Guide
- Resolving Common Build/Run Errors, compiled by section leader Jillian Tang.
- Lectures: Wednesday Intro to Recursion, Friday Recursive Fractals, Monday More Recursion
- Section: Recursion
- Textbook Chapters 7, 8, and 9. These chapters are a great resource āĀ the explanations and examples for recursion are Eric Roberts at his very best. Eric is our long-time Stanford colleague and a gifted educator.
- Ed thread recommending Eric's Thinking Recursively
Getting help
Recursion can take some time to get used to, so donāt be dismayed if you canāt immediately sit down and solve these problems. Ask for advice and guidance if you need it. Once everything clicks, youāll have a much deeper understanding of just how cool a technique this is. You can contact us on Ed, email your section leader, stop in to office hours or get one-on-one help at the virtual LaIR. As a reminder, try to visit the LaIR for coding debugging questions āĀ however, if you cannot make it to the LaIR due to timezone issues, you can post on Ed to get help. However, you must use a private post if you are including code so that you are not posting your solutions for the whole class to see.
Submit
Before you call it done, run through our submit checklist to be sure all your t
's are crossed and i
's dotted. Then upload your completed files to Paperless for grading.
Please submit only the files you edited; for this assignment, these files will be:
warmup.cpp
balanced.cpp
karel.cpp
sierpinksi.cpp
merge.cpp
short_answer.txt
š Submit to Paperless
Note: On Paperless, all due dates and submission times are expressed in Pacific time.