Last Week

It's already the last week of classes of this semester. Feels like it's been only a very short time... Anyways, the past 2 weeks, we've finished up our last 2 problem sets and our A3. I personally did not feel that they were too hard in any sense, the problems where all pretty intuitive and as long as you felt good about the lecture material, you could probably do fairly well. The lectures seem to be incredibly important, or at least amazingly convenient for learning the material quickly, and I really regret having missed several during the course of this semester. I ended up spending several times the lecture hours that I missed just trying to catch up, and I still ended up with a weaker understanding of the material. I felt this especially after getting back test 2, since I pretty lost a couple of marks on each problem for some rather small mistakes that I probably could have avoided by going to all the lectures.
Tomorrow is going to be our final term test (for the morning sections anyway) and again I have quite a bit of material to catch up with, since I've been fairly busy with my 207 project (final version also due tomorrow). I'm pretty confident about DFSA's and regexes and most of the material about formal languages. I'm gonna need a bit of work to get more familiar with non-regular languages (really wish I hadn't missed those few lectures...).
Since the slogs are due tomorrow too, I guess this is also going to be my final entry here... Don' know if these will be kept here once the course ends. This has been my first course where we are required to keep a blog like this, and overall I feel that this is quite useful. A blog makes looking back at what you learned and did earlier amazingly clear. It also makes finding important mistakes that you've made during the term quick and clear. An important thing in my opinion, that allows you to make less mistakes in the future and also get a much better result from future courses, no matter what subjects they are about.
My number 1 mistake during this course is: Missing lectures.
Somthing that I will seriously tackle in my future courses. Maybe I'll even start a new blog for each of my courses next term...
Anyways, wish all of us the best for 2009! And good luck for the rest of 08!
Now, back to studying...

Week 11

The second term test was not that bad. I apparently had reviewed just what the test was on, so I did fairly well considering the state I was in before the test. I mostly lost marks for small errors and mistakes about the necessary structure and requirements of the proofs. I got my test back early last week since I went to the evening lecture that week. And I even got a chance to ask Danny about the points where I lost marks. Now I feel much more confident about the material.

Anyways, the past few weeks we've been working on formal languages. I don't remember anything about regexes from my version of csc165, but that was like several years ago. But it doesn't seem too difficult. This will need more time studying though. Assignment 3 is due next monday. And so is the project for 207! This will be another restless weekend... Got problem set due this Friday too, so back to work.

Week 9

I'm finding it hard to keep updating my blog. There is almost always an assignment, project, or test just around the corner that constantly needs more work. Anyways, tomorrow is going to be our next csc236 term test. I can't say that I am as prepared as I was for the first test, but there is still 20 hours until the test. The problem seems to be the proof of recursion and the time-complexity problems. I missed a few classes during the past few weeks and I am currently a bit foggy about those concepts. I didn't have sufficient time to think about A2 thoroughly either before handing it in. But from reading some of my fellow classmates' blogs, it seems that I am not the only guy getting behind on classwork. I will hopefully remember to post something after the test tomorrow to reflect on how I did. It would have been nice to have A2 corrected and commented on though. (edit- Sorry A2 was returned yesterday, forgot to check it, anyway this should help a lot in reviewing for the test.) Either way, I'm going to see how much I can catch up on today.

Week 7

We finished the first term test last week and I did fairly well. The test was composed of three questions. The questions were all very simple and pretty much straight from the lectures/exercises. The only mark that I lost was for not stating clearly enough how I got my base cases in problem 2. I myself didn't think any of the questions were as difficult as the ones on A1.

And on a side note about A1, I did average on it because the TA seemed to find it difficult to follow my logic through the mountain of words I wrote. This will still be one of the things that I will need to keep working on. I should apparently try to use more mathematical notations to help streamline my work.

Recently, we've begun working on the time complexity of computer code. I believe that I have already understood most of the basics such as unwinding a recursive function, assigning values to each line/part of code, and then prooving an assumption is correct with induction. I will need to go back and redo some of the more complicated examples given in class. (I'm very glad that the professor is posting all the work from lecture online!)

But for the current week, most of my time will be spent on my other courses which are having their own midterm/term tests this week, so I will just try to keep up with lectures and finish PS4 when it comes out this week.

First Month of 236

Well I have finally started my blog for csc236. It is the last day of the deadline to submit one to professor Heap, but I somehow always have to do or atleast finish things on the last day. Personally though, I believe this is still better than not having things done by the last day.

I have just come back to school after taking over a year off, so things have taken a bit of getting used to again. The routine of studying, lectures, and assignments is still coming back quite steadily though. This is the first time that my course has required me to keep a blog, and this is the first time that I have ever had one too. And honestly this will take a bit of getting used to, but it seems like an interesting idea. 

For the first month we have already had 1 assignment and 2 problem sets. The 2 problem sets were all quite interesting. For the first, I actually finished it without any problems. The problems were similar to the ones done in class(3^n and 4^n are basically the same proofwise, just need to consider different cases; and the second question about pairs of numbers was actually just the same as an example given in class about a new element being in every one of the original subsets of an original set.). Problem set 2 was quite simple as well since it was still about stamps just as the example given in class. The only difference being that the larger "base" values of the stamps meant a much higher minimum base case after which every other natural number could be created with the "base" values.

A1 was technically much more difficult than the problem sets, since there were no equivalent examples given in class, and I found the hints posted by professor Heap extremely helpful while still leaving all the prooving to us. The first question was fairly simple: just add pie radians whenever you add a point(can be prooven by showing the new point would "attach" a new triangle outside of the original polygon, thus adding pie radians to the total sum of interior angles). The second problem was also simple(especially with the profs hints), but I might not have given the right "program" for cycling the menues that the original question was looking for. I used randomness to cycle through every combination, instead of actually making a program to cycle through every possibility from C(0, n) meals to C(n, n) meals then back again. I found the third problem about the golden ratio to be a very intuitive way of prooving irrationals. I had some difficulty with part b at first, but after looking up some of the discussions on the bulletin board, I found how simple this problem really was. 

On a special note, A1 was submitted as plain text, and I found it a little hard to get all the ideas into sentences without making it an enormous essay (I still had around 120 lines when I finished). Hope I did as well as I felt about it when I submitted it, or rather I hope the TA's will be able to understand my logic in English. This is probably one of the issues that I will have to pay the most attention to in the future(will need to pay closer attention to how professor Heap articulates his logic in class using words).

I know this is quite a long first post, and I will try to submit shorter ones every week in the future!