Exams!

I have survived CSC236 so far! The only thing left is the exam! I am actually quite hopeful that I will manage to do fairly well in this course. I have time to study and prepare myself for this exam, and I think I have learned a lot.
Near the end of the course, I actually found the material to be quite interesting, and it was fun to work on the problems. I hope that I can continue this outlook when preparing for the exam, and doing practice questions.

As I said in the last blog, I never had a chance to work on a problem outside of class, and I regret it now because I think it would've been very interesting to do. A problem I am working on, however, is time management, but I don't think that is what Danny Heap meant.. Hopefully my mark won't suffer too badly from not being able to work on a problem and track my problem through this blog. I had enough trouble as it was with the assignments. However, I hope that I continue to work hard for the remaining of this course, and I thank all those that helped me get through!

Happy almost end of first term! :)

A3

Well, A3 is over. The annoying part is that if I had had more free time to work on it I think I could have done a lot better. I'm feeling this way in all of my classes. I'm too busy and I don't know how to fix it and my work is suffering because of it.

Once again, for the assignment, going to Lila's help hours really did help and it was nice to know that other people were struggling with it as well. I think I managed to do pretty well, and I understood a lot of what the assignment was about, which is nice. I am hopeful that I will do decently on the exam and finish the course on a good note.

Though I haven't ever had time or energy to find a problem to work on and write about in this. Not sure if it's too late for that... Ah well.

Languages, Float Machines, and REs

In the lecture for languages and alphabets, I actually found that I understood it quite well. I had limited experience with them before, and it was very interesting to learn it in a classroom setting. Building the automaton was a bit confusing at first, but once I took the time to look over the notes and understand it, it didn't seem as difficult anymore. Plus the word automaton reminds me of the movie Hugo, which I enjoyed, haha.

The thing I like the most and find the most interesting right now, however, is making the float machines and drawing the diagrams. It's so fascinating to me, although I still find it a bit hard. Once again, in one of the tutorials, the examples we took up seemed pretty straightforward and I was feeling pretty confident in it, and I understood it. Then the quiz was much harder and unclear and I had no idea how to draw the machine. It rather dampened my mood, but I hope that I will be able to attend some office hours this week to get help with the third assignment.

Regular expressions are also very interesting, and I like how they overlap a bit with CSC207. It is cool how they are similar in the two classes, but also very different in terms of the syntax. I found it amazing that Danny asked the class for a regular expression for a particular situation and people were able to answer him right away with an idea of what it was, and they were either almost right or in fact correct. I have no idea how people can think of these things so quickly and so well, but I think they will go far in life. My hope is that with a bit of practice and a week of trying, I will have figured out A3 and be able to hand something in that might be correct. We shall see!

Assignment #2 Results

I am very pleased with my Assignment 2 results, and I am very glad I managed to go to office hours and get help with it. I really found that going to office hours from Danny Heap and from the TA's really helped and I recommend it to everyone who is struggling. They helped me understand what was needed in the assignment, and also that a lot of it was outlined in the course notes, so I could look at the structure in the notes and transform the content into what was needed. I ran out of time on the second question, but I can hopefully keep doing decent work and end up with an okay mark in this course! :)

Assignment 2

I went to office hours this week to help me start on the first question of Assignment 2. When I was there I thought it helped a lot and that I was going to get far once I sat down and really thought about it. Well, I thought about it and I still don't know what to do. I think that the pattern is like the Fibonacci numbers, but I don't know how the actual digits are transformed from one length to the next, or where to partition it or whatever we are supposed to do. I'm pretty worried about it, especially because I am not able to go to office hours tomorrow before it's due.

The second question is going a little better than the first, though, mostly because we kind of get to copy from the Course Notes. I think I have the first part done, so now I just need to prove that T is in big theta of log(n). Hopefully this won't be too hard. My brain is pretty tired at the moment, so I will come back to the assignment tomorrow after class and before and after I have to work.

Unwinding and Test Back

The tutorial on October 15th went alright, and the second question [proving that T(2^k) = k +1] actually made a lot of sense to me. It gave me a bit of hope that maybe I could actually do okay in this course. I finally seemed to understand using the Induction Hypothesis within the Induction Step of going from n to n+1.
I was hoping that the quiz would be similar to this question, but I think it was more similar to the first question, which I missed because I was late. Hopefully since things in other classes have calmed down a bit I will be able to look at the tutorial exercises beforehand and get a feel of what the quiz might be like ahead of time. :)

In other news, today in class we got the test back, and I did worse than I was expecting, because I made a stupid mistake on both question 1 and question 2. I defined P(n) with "For all natural numbers n, blah blah blah". My friend pointed out that the reason you can't define P(n) for all natural numbers is because often that's what you are trying to prove. Duh! I felt pretty silly that I wrote it down that way, and coincidentally lost 2 marks. Oh well, that's my own fault. At least I won't do it for next time!

First Test

With the first test tomorrow morning, I must admit I am very nervous. This class is way over my head, and I don't even really know how to study. A1 did not go well at all, so I am very worried about how I will end up doing in this course. Luckily they try very hard to help people pass, by skewing the weightings of things, which is nice. It also shows that maybe this course shouldn't be as hard, or it shouldn't be required for a Comp Sci program.. Ah well, nothing I can do about that. I just have to try my best and that's all there is to it.

I think that I understand Mathematical Induction pretty well. It makes sense to me that if you can prove something for n, and if you can prove it for n+1, then it works for all n. The problem I have is getting from A to B. I understand the structure of the proof, but the content is where I have trouble. I don't think it's something you can learn, because once you prove something, it won't be asked on a test or assignment again. I don't really know how to get better at figuring out proofs, so if anyone has suggestions, please let me know. Thanks!

I also need to understand the other types of Induction we've gone over in class. Back to trying to study I go!