Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Ecosystem——complex, but very interesting!!!

First of all, sorry for the delay of posting slogs. 

So two weeks ago, we got our first project to do, it was a real programming project for me! In this project I need to understand every term first, and then follow the instructions to write down some definitions and check-expect to make every test works properly, and get the "real" ecosystem on our laptop!!!

The first problem for me was that there were so many terms! For me, in this course, it is more logical than other kinds of courses. So I need to remember all the basic things, and based on those basic terms, I can build different DrRacket files. So in ecosystem, I have terms like"MICE-START","FOXES-START", "FOX-DEATH-RATE", "MOUSE-BIRTH-RATE", "FOX-MOUSE-EAT-BREED-RATE","FOX-MOUSE-MEAL-RATE". So in this process, I kind of confused a little bit, but luckily I got through everything. And I started to read through all the work I need to do. I carefully followed every instructions, and I felt the whole thing was not so hard, because "check-expect" and "define" are pretty similar, I could get hints from either one. So after I finished all my work first time, all 9 tests in this project passed. I felt very happy. 

However, the second day, I went to ask Pro. Heap about my project, I found that my update part was not successful. And I also got an idea how to edit that part, and I, with my group mates, went to lab to figure everything out. And that this time, we really met some troubles. When we trying to replace each term by using eco, we mixed up a lot of things, and we accidentally got the wrong equation for finding the total amount of mice and foxes. So we tried the useful hint we got from other students, but we failed the test. We were so disappointed, because replacing each term in the equation took really long time as we did it very carefully, but unfortunately, we were not careful enough. But as we all know, making a mistake is really easy, but finding what is wrong is really hard. So finally, we decided to delete everything we did, and check everything we had already did. And after 10 minutes, we found that we got the wrong equation. And then we took a long breath, and kept working on this project. So after we corrected the mistake, everything went pretty smoothly. And finally we got our updated ecosystem, which made us really excited.

As for our group's result, at first, if we set mice number and foxes number into the balance ratio, we got fox' picture and mice's picture are same size. But if we change anyone's initial amount, then the size of the pictures of those two animals are not the same any more——one picture will become larger and larger, and after a certain amount of times to grow larger, this picture will become smaller and smaller until that picture almost get disappeared. This process reflects the real situation in real ecosystem. So I suddenly feel that computer science is so amazing, everything in this world can be modeled by computer, and we can also create our own "society" on computer!!! I wish I can learn more in this year, and get more knowledge of making lots more interesting programs!:))) 


1 comment:

  1. http://sarahtianslog104.blogspot.ca/2013/02/week-6-binary-decimal.html?view=timeslide

    This is Sarah's slog. I really like her way to demonstrate all the process we learned in lectures about how to transform a base-10 number into a binary number. It is clear and straight forward. This way really helps us to review what we have learned in this week.

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