Tour of Anne Hoy and the Beauty of Recursion

Like the majority of my class, the first CSC148H1F assignment, the "Tour of Anne Hoy" was quite a challenge. Frustrating on some days and entertaining on others, it was definitely a program that both tested and sharpened my programming abilities.

What I enjoyed most about this project (when I was finally done with it, not when I was working on it!) was how it displayed the elegance of recursion, especially with SolvingController. Once I finally had SolvingController working, it was entertaining to watch my program automatically display the 10-cheese solution in the same time I could manually solve a five-, six-, or seven-cheese problem. What amazed me even more that visually showed recursion at work was how, in the process of moving the stack of cheeses from the first to the last stool, intermediate steps built up smaller towers of cheese on intermediate stools:

For smaller numbers of cheeses, I could manually imitate SolvingController's solution based on intuition. As the cheeses increased, however, I would easily make mistakes and get lost because I wasn't using recursive logic and calculations. SolvingController didn't care how many cheeses were present because, in all cases, the recursive logic was the same. It reminded me of one lesson that I was taught in a high school programming course: computers are not smart; they're just fast. All SolvingController did was recursively define my intuition and repeat it at higher speeds than I could calculate and move cheeses - and, when the stress of the assignment was finally gone, it was quite fun to watch!