Week 7: It's going good

Midterms have been keeping me from focusing on CSC236 a lot, and now I think I'm in trouble since Assignment #2 is due Monday and I'm still unsure as to how I should explain everything. I guess it's going to be a long weekend of working on it.

I'm finding the stuff we're doing now more interesting, proving programs correct. This part of it seems like its much more relevant to computer science than the first bit was, but I suppose the initial inductive proofs were needed in order to be able to prove programs correct. I'd like to mention something about what was shown in Friday's lecture, mainly about the proof for the function egcd(n, m). Prof. Heap said that we would have to prove special cases separately, if n <= m. Well if n < m then n%m is simply n, so then egcd(m, n) is called. Now this is a state that matches the inductive hypothesis, since n < m, and then we know egcd(m,n) returns gcd(m,n) which is the same as gcd(n,m). The only special case would be for n=m.

I don't feel like I'm running into any problems in the course or having a hard time, so for the time being I don't have too much else to say.

Week 6: Work Overload

I didn't get my test back on Friday so I'm still not sure if I did as good as I hope/think I did. I know I can just go to the cdf marking website but I really don;t want to, just incase. Right now I'm really backed up though, too many more midterms to study for, and now Assignment #2 to do also. I hope I can finish it without having to go to as many office hours as I did for Assignment #1. Speaking of Assignment #1, I was pleasantly suprised with my mark. I hope I can maintain it through the whole term!

I don't really have too much else to write about since I'm just working on Assignment #2, while trying to study for a STA247 midterm and MAT223, in addition to starting my CSC207 group project. I hope by the end of the week I'll have more motivation to maintain my work ethic and have something significant to write about.

Week 5: Test Over!

Term test #1: not as easy as I was expecting. I spent awhile studying but I really didn't know how to study for it. I reviewed all my notes and redid the questions from class but I sort of had them memorized so it wasn't anything new that I was solving. The past tests sort of helped...but I guess in a course like this it's all about understanding the concepts. When I woke up this morning I felt fairly confident, but as soon as I started reading the test my blood ran cold. I spent probably 20 minutes on one question. But luckily, luckily, in the last 15 minutes of class I miraculously figured everything out - at least I hope. My only concern is that, well, being that I had only about 10 minutes to write up each proof I did it extremely messily. I even wrote "sorry for the messy writing" just before handing it in. If I could make one request it would be for some practice problems to be posted about a week or some prior to term tests, I think that would make studying a lot easier or at last help us feel more confident if we can do the practice questions.

Now I get a long weekend of not too much work to do, only study for a PSY midterm, finish assignment #1 for CSC207, and possibly work on Problem Set #3 if it gets posted.

Week 4: A1 down, Term Test #1 to come.

Well I made it through A1, after a few office visits and a lot of asking TAs stupid questions. Imagine my surprise after finding out from a TA that we're allowed to simply state that Phi is greater than zero while I spent hours attempting to prove it, rather unsuccessfully, with the information given in question three. But its over, that's what counts.
I'm slightly worried about the upcoming term test since we really didn't cover all that much - only Simple Induction, Complete Induction, and a bit of Well Ordering. I really really hope that some practice problems will be posted along with some past tests, that would help give me a good gauge of the difficulty of the test. I've done the few questions in the textbook that seem relevant and reviewed lecture notes, the assignment, and the problem sets, but I still don't feel comfortable without having brand new questions to practice on. I'm hoping that the test will have a postage question, those aren't overly difficult yet are easy to come up with, plus they can be done with Simple Induction or Complete Induction. Or maybe a question involving types of sets, where it has to be partitioned into sets without a certain element and sets with that element. I'd rather there not be any questions with Well Ordering since it seems disconnected from induction proofs and we haven't studied it in much detail in the lectures. But overall I believe this first test won't be too much of a problem because I've learned induction before CSC236.
All that's left to do is study and not get consumed in the wave of work that comes every October. Oh October, I've come to loathe you, your constant battery of assignments, midterms, and whatever foul bits of education you can spew from your seasonal depths. But you have Halloween, so I forgive you. Atleast until next October.
I really need more free time.