My Last Slog :)

Class is over and I have to say even though I struggled learning at least one-third of the course material, this class has really helped me think straight. By straight I mean, I now look at problems and come up with solutions much faster and problems I use to think were hard are not so hard anymore.

I have to write some solution to a problem that I've been working on in this course that has some mathematical nature, so I'm going to go with the problem that we did on Wednesday. The answer that I came up with was the list with the highest product would be one which has the largest number of different integers that do not include 1. If there is a tie, it would be the max() of those two lists. I'm not 100% on this and right now I don't have all the time to spend on this one problem so my solution is final for now. If I ever come back to this, I'm pretty sure that would not be my final solution.

All in all, This class helped me a lot in terms of the way I think about problems and I thank Professor Heap for that.

Slog #8, Title: Assignment

The third assignment is due in 3 days and so far I managed to look at the first question. Pretty serious stuff. I don't know why, but at this point in the course, if I see a statement in symbols it reminds me of a movie. For example, a proof with Big-O reminds me of the movie Holes or any proof with a limit reminds me of Mission Impossible. The latter makes perfect sense. My childhood habits are kicking in now since I'm using pictures to represent phrases and symbols. Maybe this means I'm really stressed or maybe I'm getting dumber. Anyways, I need to brush up on all the Big-Greek Letter proofs because right now I don't have a clue of what I'm doing even though I managed to get the first one. This is only because it was one we did in the tutorial. As I kept looking through the questions, I remember we did a questions similar to number 2 as well in the tutorial, but I totally forgot how to do it. I think I'm going to find that tutorial question again and ask Maria for clarification. Right now, I know I'm not trying hard enough to keep up with all the work. Hopefully, I don't keep this up and get back on track soon.

Slog #7, I think.., Title: Response

As Ryan said on his most recent blog, the second mid-term was surprisingly easy, but hopefully Professor Heap doesn't read this and think that the final exam should be much harder since we did well on the last mid-term :p. The last question was so similar to the previous exam I had the last one on my cheat sheet. Surprisingly, I did not use the cheat sheet for any of the questions. I was about to use it for the last question, but I had so much time left, I kinda challenged myself to do it. After all was done, I took a peak at the cheat sheet and I had the last question down perfectly. Since I barely used the cheat sheet in the previous mid-terms, I don't actually think I'll need it all that much for the final. I mean once I understand how to solve one of the problems, I end up automatically coming up with solutions in my head for the others. Also as Ryan said, the mid-term was a huge confidence booster since the cheat sheet barely did anything and now I actually enjoy trying to come up with ways to prove a statement. If all goes well, I think I can manage to pull off a decent mark in this course :)

Ryan's Blog: http://ryanslog165.blogspot.ca/

Slog #6 Topic: Assignment and Mid-Term

The midterm is next week, and doing the assignment really helped me learn how write proofs much better. I feel much more confident in my proofs and hopefully Professor Heap will post answers to the assignment earlier than the test so I can learn from the mistakes I made. The new stuff we're learning now is really not getting through to me. In the tutorial, the steps were counted in each line and it was really hard to understand what was happening because in the lecture the steps for executing a line of code didn't seem nearly as close to the steps in the tutorial. Anyways I'm going to keep reading the course notes and I will ask Maria for clarification next tutorial. I found out that even if I don't understand a concept at first, I just keep moving forwards and somehow I end up understanding it after when I go back to it.

Topic: Proofs Slog #5

I didn't get much time to look at all the examples of proofs, but so far it seems that the proof is right in front of you. To derive different equations and such out of the statement that seems obvious seems really complicated. It's almost like you have to think backwards (in most situations I've encountered). What I really found interesting is proof using the contrapositive. There was one example, a while back ago, that really helped me understand the concept of the contrapositive. But now I think I forgot most of what was even happening in class. A little review should help me get back on track and then a whole lot of practice with proofs should help me get through. Moreover, the format of a proof really bugs me. Sometimes I can figure out or get an idea of how to do the proof, but I can't execute due to the format. Again I know this will come easy with a lot of practice. It seems that all I need to do is to practice and review everything on proofs after this very relaxing "Reading week" :).

Topic: Mid Term Date: 06/02/2013 Slog #4

After 3 mid terms the last week I was just too tired to write the slog so Maria I hope you don't mind me writing 2 for this week :)

In any case, the midterm for 165 wasn't that bad, in my opinion. I gained a little bit of confidence after that  and it actually helped me move further on in the course. I'm just going to keep this short and simple and leave all of my complaining for the next Slog on Proofs.

Topic: Translating Date: 31/01/2013 Slog #3

I'm finally starting to get a clear picture of how to use logical symbols together and understanding the meaning of the sentence. However, translating from English to Symbols is still a little unclear to me. Since English is so ambiguous, I sometime mix up the way I use my symbols or maybe I'm just not good at using symbols. For example, I sometimes use the implication symbol, when it should really be a conjunction. My question is that when should I use those symbols such as ^,=>,<=>,v,etc to join a statement together in the correct order it's written in. These symbols confuse me sometimes and I can't really use symbols to express longer statements. I understand truth tables help, but some statements are just too confusing. I did practice questions and usually, at the end, I do end up understanding how to express an English statement in symbols, but it seems I have to read the sentence many times and sometimes I look at part of the answer to get an understanding of the rest, but this method will not work on the midterm coming up and I would like to know how I can get better and faster at writing out English in symbols. Also, most of the time I'm not confident with what I expressed in symbols because the corresponding English statement seems to have different meanings every time I read it. I have to find someway to get over this bump and be able to express English sentences in symbols as if it was second nature to me.