July 27, 2015 Log No. 300

Already the first day over!

Pair programming was actually more tiring than I would have thought, if only because sometimes it’s tough to verbalize why you want to try something out. It’s definitely a pretty positive experience though, especially when you both contribute and finally get the thing working. The triumph is real.

The concepts today weren’t new/overwhelming, but there was some serious debugging involved to make sure the Match-2 program worked properly once we got the Computer player integrated. We had pretty much set up the overall skeleton of the program by lunchtime, but all of the afternoon from 2pm onwards was building out and tracing through the computer AI to figure out why it kept getting stuck in an infinite loop after the first successful match. Finally came out that it was wrongfully handling “accidental matches”–matches that occurred purely from chance, not from prior knowledge.

Okay, handled that, but then had to rethink the finer points of how to handle known matches: sometimes you discover matching cards in 2 completely separate matching rounds, sometimes you discover the 1 matching card you were missing at the beginning of the round, in time to select the other you already knew about. So there was THAT logic to contend with. Honestly, once we pinpointed the problem, it’s a (relatively) easy fix, but debugging in command line, even with byebug, can be a bit of a drag still. At least in the end, got it all to work.

Tomorrow, then.