Patrick finished grading Assignment 02 last night. Like the previous assignment, it was mostly done by an autograder on test cases, with manual intervention as needed.

You can download the test cases we used here: assignment02-test-cases.tar.gz. Each test case consists of a problem and a solution as generated by the simple hill climber (SHC). Your program was run on each test case, and its solution was compared with the SHC’s. The SHC did not vary its heuristic when finding solutions, whereas your program was given the evaluation function (coverage or bigger) that it was attempting to optimize.

We placed the output of the autograder into the Moodle comments for the assignment. Assuming your program executed without error, the output you see in Moodle will look something like the following:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

15x15-thin.problem (coverage): 4.8
15x15-thin.problem (bigger): 7.7
15x15-exact-horizontal.problem (coverage): 50.0
15x15-exact-horizontal.problem (bigger): 20.0
30x30-random.problem (coverage): 7.1
30x30-random.problem (bigger): -1.4
15x15-vertical.problem (coverage): 5.2
15x15-vertical.problem (bigger): 24.5
15x15-exact-vertical.problem (coverage): 0.0
15x15-exact-vertical.problem (bigger): 0.0
15x15-horizontal.problem (coverage): 0.0
15x15-horizontal.problem (bigger): 37.2
15x15-big.problem (coverage): 0.0
15x15-big.problem (bigger): 27.1
15x15-small.problem (coverage): 0.0
15x15-small.problem (bigger): 4.2
5x5-example.problem (coverage): 0.0
5x5-example.problem (bigger): 0.0
20x20-random.problem (coverage): 9.7
20x20-random.problem (bigger): -0.8
0.9

The last line is your grade, as described in the assignment. Each other line lists a problem, a heuristic, and your program’s performance relative to the SHC, given as a percentage. For example, in the above output, the submitted program did 7.1% better than the SHC on the 30x30-random.problem with the coverage evaluation function, and 1.4% worse on the bigger evaluation function for that same problem.

If Patrick had to edit your assignment to make it work with the autograder, he deducted 0.1 points (out of 1.0). By far the most common cause of this was programs that didn’t parse command line arguments correctly, ignoring coverage or bigger.

(An aside: All assignments are equally weighted in grade calculations, unless otherwise noted. Assignment 01 isn’t worth ten times as many points as this one!)

Please come see either of us if you have questions or believe we made a mistake in grading your assignment. We want you to get all the credit you’ve earned, and will gladly fix errors on our part.