Problem Set 4, Task 1 Hints

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Task 1 Notes, Hints, Suggestions

• To save yourself time, think carefully about your strategy before writing any code! Draw lots of pictures and convince yourself that it works. You are encouraged to develop the strategy with your classmates, but you must code it on your own.
  
  
• You are encouraged to define any auxiliary Follower methods that you find helpful. In particular, you may find it helpful to define methods that return a boolean value indicating the position of the next bagel relative to the buggle's current position and heading. For example, it is a good idea to define a helper method with the following specification:

  public boolean isBagelInFront();
  Returns true if there is a cell with a bagel in front of this buggle and false otherwise.

  This method is similar to the isFacingTrail() method presented in Lecture #9.

  It is also a good idea to define methods that check for a bagel to the left or right of a buggle.
  

• You should not need to write very much code to implement your strategy. Our solution for the tick() method takes less than 20 lines, much of which is whitespace, comments, and method headers.
  
  
• Strive to make your code as readable and understandable as possible. Use meaningful method and variable names. Use comments where appropriate. (Do not comment every line. Only use comments to explain aspects of the code that are not immediately obvious.)
  
  
• The default grid size is 15×15. You may find it helpful to debug your strategy in a smaller grid. You can set the grid size by changing the arguments to setDimensions() method within the setup() method of the FollowWorld class.
  
  
• The paths are randomly generated by a so-called psuedo-random number generator. The generator is initialized with a seed value that guarantees that you will get the exact same random sequence of paths every time you run the program. This aids debuggability.

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