163: Recursion

Programming Throwdown

Episode 163 - Recursion

Intro topic: Electric Cars

News/Links:

• Snake Game in 101 Bytes in a QR Code
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/15ab4ct/my_qr_code_snake_game_is_now_only_101_bytes/
• Superconductor Rumors abound
  • https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/whats-going-on-with-the-reports-of-a-room-temperature-superconductor/
• OpenWorm
  • https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm
• Creator of vim passes away
  • https://news.itsfoss.com/vim-creator-passed-away/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Jack Bogle https://amzn.to/43YqANR
• Jason:
  • Mistborn Saga: https://amzn.to/3DJkUN8

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Jason:
  • reMarkable https://remarkable.com/
• Patrick:
  • Stellarium (iOS and Android)

Topic: Recursion

• What is it
  • Divide-And-Conquer
  • Fibonacci numbers
• How to (not) teach recursion
• Practical Applications
  • Graph operations
    • Tree retrieval, balancing
    • Graph Search
  • Spatial partitioning
• Pitfalls
  • Stack size
• How to solve problems with recursion
  • (1) Consider the base cases
  • (2) Build the recursive step
  • (3) Look for ways the recursion will not terminate and fix
  • (4) (rest are optional) Remove global contexts
  • (5) Add memoization
  • (6) Build solutions incrementally

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