lucas-marchand / random-walk Goto Github PK

# Project 3: Random Walk.

* Author: Lucas Marchand
* Class: CS121 Section 6
* Semester: Spring 2018

## Overview

Creates a pathway from the bottom left corner to the top right corner
of a user specified grid randomly stepping.

## Compiling and Using

when running the RandomWalkDriver program, the user will specify a positive
integer for a grid size, and a non-negative integer for a seed of the number
generator. This will be prompted by the console and will return the path as 
a formatted string to the console for the user to see.

When the user runs the RandomWalkGUI program. The user will pass in the arguments
for grid size and a seed value without being prompted by the console. This will
create a graphical representaiton of the path for the user to see.

## Discussion

There was a ton of issues when it came to figuring out how to get the proper 
end point to the program. For some reason I was hung up on the test class not
being able to get the correct value for my end point to the array list. This
ultimately was resolved when I realized that java frames are odd in their
coordinate systems and threw me for a loop.

The other issues I had alot of trouble with was encapsulating the arraylist
so that it couldnt be accessed externally. It was not until after I went to 
the arraylist API that I found there was a method that allowed me to give
a clone of the arraylist without actually returning the ArrayList itself.

Overall this was a fun and challenging project and it was a great intro to
writing our own classes.

IMPROVEMENTS: Explain what "implements" means in regards to an interface. It
took me more time to figure that out than half of the methods I was writing.

## Testing

Testing involved trying several negative integers for the RandomWalkDriver 
program to see if it would accept anything that was going to give incorrect
results. Currently the program does not handle if the user enters a double
value. 

the seed value was tested with border cases such as -1,0,1000 to see if any
of those would make it throw an exception.

## Extra Credit

not attempted

## Sources used

Source used to understand interfaces and implementing them:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/usinginterface.html

for documenting using javadoc

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5011291/usage-of-see-in-javadoc