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.