Advice for Submitting a Partially Finished Project

Your last late day for a project is rapidly approaching and you haven’t been able to track down that bug! What should you do? First of all, it’s better to submit your partially-complete project now than to hold onto it, not get any credit for it, and delay your other work. But there are things you can do to make sure you get credit for the work you have done!

Writing code that performs exactly as expected is one part of your project grade, but your grade also consists of the report writeup and the stylistic features of your code such as writing good comments and including headers. If you are less than confident in your code, take a break from debugging and polish your code style and your writeup to make sure that those are well presented!

Give yourself at least 2 hours to do this before the project submission deadline. If you finish early and you want to spend more time debugging, then you are encouraged to!

Specifically make sure that you:

• Comment your code! This includes writing comments describing each function, and key lines of code.
• Make sure that your access modifiers are included and correct (e.g. class variables should generally be private).
• Include an informative title and acknowledgements in your report!
• Make sure that you have fully and carefully answered the discussion questions in the report as these are an integral part of our evaluation of your understanding, and are an important part of preparing for the exams in this course!
• If you are unable to generate the results we ask for with your code base, please give us a hypothetical sketch of your results. This should include what experiments you would run, what outputs you would report, and what you expect to see. You can see an example below.
• Write your abstract section as usual! You can mention your expected results as a hypothetical.

Example hypothetical results section:

I was unable to get my code to fully work, but I have included a sketch of the expected results to demonstrate how I am thinking about the analysis.

I planned to use my code to run simulations for how quickly the agent could solve the maze given a maze of size 3x3, 4x4 and 5x5 for all 3 methods. I planned to record both the length of the resulting path, and how many squares were explored for all 3 experiments, and to present them in a table. What I expected to see was that the first method would find the shortest paths but result in the most exploration, the second method would find longer paths but result in less exploration, and the third method would result in both long paths and a large amount of exploration. This would suggest that the first and second methods would be preferred in different cases, and that the third method would never be preferred.

Caption: This table shows the expected results for both the path lengths and number of squares explored for each of the 3 methods in mazes of 3 sizes: 3x3, 4x4 and 5x5.