The first week of February was a short one as well. The university decided to close down (once again) due to weather issues. However, we did learn (or kept going over) some useful and very interesting stuff. Prof. Downing has put a lot of focus on the importance and usefulness of assertions, which are a very fast and effective way of testing at runtime whether your code is doing what it is supposed to be doing. In order to show us in code how they are usually implemented, he gave us a couple of examples where some assertions work, meaning they make sure the code is doing the correct thing, and others where they don't hold and even some where they don't get called due to other factors. He also quizzed us on this so I definitely think this is something he wants us to start implementing as part of our coding standards.
We already started our Netflix project. I think it is one of the most interesting projects I have gotten lately. It consists of trying to predict what a handful of Netflix users think of different movies (aka their ratings). There are different cache files, which contain important data regarding their usual behavior (past ratings, ratings per decade, etc.) and, with the help of those files, we need to predict what they think of any movie x. Prof. Downing told us that Netflix at one point was offering a million dollars to whomever came close to what their actual algorithm predicts (I cannot remember how precise it had to be). So for now my partner and I have implemented a reading function in order to process the cache files and store them for future use, and a running function, which basically starts the program. I think it is going to be a really interesting lab and one that will give us great satisfaction in the end, given that we'll be able to say that we implemented a Netflix rating-predictor (hopefully!)
No comments:
Post a Comment