W2 D5

Yesterday was the last day to work on the N queens algorithm sprint. I feel genuinely cheated, me and my pair worked on one part of it for probably 8 hours and never got the correct solution. We got help from three different tech mentors (basically TAs for the bootcamp world), and tried probably 200–300 different solutions but could not get the correct answer. When the solution came out later that night we ended up taking a look at the part we were stuck on and are dismayed that the solution uses techniques that we have never seen in use before.

The for loop has no starting position and two indexes are increased at the same time and the iteration through the board starts at a negative position, and then calls the negative position as a column index which frankly seems impossible.

This was incredibly frustrating to see the solution and then still not have any idea how it performs the task that we toiled so hard over. I have scheduled some office hours today to go over it so hopefully I get some answers.

To keep high spirits throughout the day even when met with failure for such a long period builds character (?) I guess. Would have still been pretty happy to just get it right away.

I’m not going to look at the rest of the solution code and pick it back up towards the end of the camp and see the progress I have made since week two. Hopefully by the end of this program I will at least have an understanding of how the solution operates.