Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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This was decades ago, so I doubt it!

The lecturer pre-generated small black & white square bitmaps of single characters from a sample set of fonts to use as aids during development. (Just the lower case letters a to m.) Then your mark was the percentage your OCR could recognise from a much larger set generated from about a thousand fonts.

In the same course the next major project was to make an AI for the card game Hearts. This is a four-player game, and the project materials included an automated tester that could be given any 4 AIs and would score them against each other. In the labs we would battle our AIs while developing them.

I ended up getting the second highest score out of a class of three hundred students and I still don't know how to play that game well. (I got the AI to teach itself the probability tables for optimal play, which I didn't memorise.)

I'm just struck by how cool those assignments are — I feel like this might be one of the biggest differences in school quality, most of the stuff I've had to do at an unremarkable school felt a lot more like "fake problems", but this OTOH sounds like something that would actually get me a lot more motivated even if I had no clue where to begin at first

That lecturer was spectacularly good at teaching, and stood out from the rest of the pack so much that it was almost hilarious.

He used a digital projector in an era where that was still rare in even computer science courses so that he could demonstrate the basics of the edit-build-debug cycle. He'd deliberately leave small errors in the code to "fix" and he'd get the class involved with suggestions on where to look and what to try.

All of his projects were competitive, because it got the students much more engaged if they were racing each other. I believe the year after mine had to play a monopoly-style game where trucks were going around a "game board" and could buy and sell stuff for profit, could run out of fuel, borrow money, etc...

Meanwhile all the other lecturers would drone on and scribble unreadable gibberish on a blackboard. We had one lecturer give us a final exam where half the marks depended on converting 7 lines of C to assembly, except that 7 lines had 5 errors in it. Two of the lines were just the braces, which means effectively every line was faulty.

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