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CSC WEEK 10


By week ten, the focus was mainly on project 2, recursion and list of operations and Fibonacci numbers. During that week, we received a little of background about the project thematic. This was mainly focus on animation. We were asked to run an infection, and to play around with the immunity and infection duration, to see how virulent a disease could be. Additional to the project introduction, we focused more on recursion operations on extensive lists, such as the ones that conform a webpage. There was not difficulty in that topic, because it was similar to what we have been doing the rest of the semester. Moving out from the recursion and list operations, the class focus was the introduction of Fibonacci numbers. The main notion was to understand that computers are not as fast as we think. In fact, with Fibonacci numbers, we observed that the computer had a tough time processing the command due to the redundancy in the definition. Thus, we ended it up with a situation where sometimes the computation blows up, because of the redundant calculations. The entertaining part began here, we started to create a solution to this problem. But first, we calculated the time for Fibonacci 100, just to see how long the computer will take. As we increased the Fibonacci number, the ratio of time increased as well, by a ratio of 1.6. Therefore, to calculate Fibonacci 100, the computer will take around 18 billion of years. Sometimes there is some sort of happiness or utility to do computation that take time. For instance, passwords have a vast number of combinations. And because many people are trying to hack our passwords, it is a good consequence that processing all the combinations take that long. But in other occasions, such as the Fibonacci numbers, re-implementing a definition is needed. As we established before, the problem was that we were almost doubling the ratio of time. The reimplementation for this problem was to produce to numbers instead of one, for example fib10 and its predecessor fib9. This will reduce the number of computations to 100, which is fairly quickly for a computer to do. Overall, the baseline at the end of this week was that we can make computation faster and shorter by rethinking how implement a function.

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