Today’s lecture was about recursion. I remember learning about recursion in college when I was taking an introductory computer science class. That class used LISP, which I did not think was a very beginner friendly (or modern) language. After today’s lecture, I have a new respect for LISP – at least based on my faint memory of it. I actually looked for online LISP classes during the bio break for the lecture. Hmm… only time will tell if I will ever dive into LISP again!
Project
Today I was able to make a lot of progress on my project in terms of setting up the options the user will have after the getaway ends. The pieces are all there, and I am finally starting to connect them. Among other things, I wrote the part of the app that gives a user various options after the getaway ends, including icons, links, etc… and it all worked the first time I tried it! (Yeah for planning and pseudo-code!)
I was also sad today. I really wanted the user to select the options after the getaway ends and interact with the database using a bot. I even figured out how I would do it. I can build another bot using AIML (and a bit of recursion to “train” the bot to recognize and respond to like situations) in the Pandorabots IDE (which allows for testing). The bot would give the user various options (play getaway again, login, etc…) and then route the user based upon the user’s response. If the user chooses to login, then s/he would continue with the bot, who could help the user chose a getaway to replay or play a new one, etc…Pandorabots has an API, and I can use the API to connect the bot with my app. I am going to store the links here because perhaps one day I will be able to do this:
Hmm… If I only had more time I would love to be able to do this.
My only other issue today was the question queue, which is what students use to get help. When I seek an instructor’s help, I am usually really stuck. The frustrating part is that I may work without needing help for a long while, but when I need help, I would like to get help before the girls that seek out help multiple times per day….
Off to bed…
michdcode 