Practical tips debugging deep recursion?

Question

I\'m working on a board game algorithm where a large tree is traversed using recursion, however, it\'s not behaving as expected. How do I handle this and what are you experience

Answer 1

I would normally unit-test such algorithms with one or more predefined datasets that have well-defined outcomes. I would typically make several such tests in increasing order of complexity.

If you insist on debugging, it is sometimes useful to doctor the code with statements that check for a given value, so you can attach a breakpoint at that time and place in the code:

  if ( depth = X && item.id = 32) {
     // Breakpoint here
  }