One more Week!/10th week

Just one more week of class left, then it'll be exam period. I think it was worthy to mention that I actually remembered everything I learned in calculus, and since we did proving involving L'Hopital's rule at the end of the week last week, all the materials just rushed in my head. But I fully get the concept of rationalizing two function to see if one is increasing at a faster rate than the other.

We went into halt problems this week. So far I understand the concept of halt and I think the hardest part of understanding halt is perhaps the acceptance of knowing that it does not work. Assignment 3 does not seem to complicated and I hope that the exam isn't too hard.

Test 2 Results/9th Week

I was not pleased with my test mark. But I have to admit, I really did screw up on the first question. I completely misread the question and now looking back at it I realized how stupid the mistake was. It was a really straightforward question, we've done it in class, in tutorials, and even some of the questions on A2 had similar concepts. At least the test mark wouldn't affect my overall mark by too much. Just have to study really hard and keep a clear head for the exam.

Also feeling a bit sad since there are only two weeks left of school. However, that also means that exam seasons are coming up, I should start getting ready to study away for my exams. There are only a couple more evaluation that are to be made before the final exam, there's the quizzes, A3, and this slog.

Also at the end of last class Prof.Heap mentioned that we're starting with halting functions soon, if I remembered correctly he mentioned this topic at the beginning of the course stating that the hardest part of this course is probably at the beginning, and near the end when we do halting functions, this had made me anxious about this particular topic.

P.S. In 148 we learned the 'Heap' ADT and that reminded we of Prof. Heap.

Second Test/8th week

So in the lectures we talked about more proofs involving upper bound and lower bound, then we started doing proofs involving polynomials. It all seemed pretty trivial and all we had to do was come up with numbers that will always to strictly greater (>) or strictly less than (<) and maintain that inequality.

I couldn't prep really well for the test, but on the contrary I think I did well. I did make a cheat sheet but it is just general guide lines to follow to prove things. I also wrote down some types of proofs and how one would approach them. However, I was confident in my understanding with proofs since I knew how to do question 1 - 5 for assignment 2 before the solution was posted. The first two questions were really straight forward since we've done many similar problems either inside or outside of class. The last question took a bit of thought but I did manage to do it with the definition that was given.

Things are looking good, I hope it stays this way.

Complexity/7th week

This blog was posted later than I expected as I was kept busy by other work. I have a bad feeling about the next couple of weeks, especially leading up to exam seasons.

One thing that I have to mention is this confusion involving counting the steps. During the tutorial, every single operation was counted as a step, so it is possible to count multiple steps for a single line. I'm pretty sure that someone brought this up in class. Eventually I realized that it doesn't matter how you count the steps, it just differs by a constant factor so it does not change the bigger picture.

Maximum slice looked really long, and tough. I couldn't really follow it readily in class. But after re-reading the slides and notes a couple of times I am starting to understand it better. It just gets really hectic since you have i which depend on n, and then j depends on i, and the number of time the second while loop executes depends on i and n, specifically from i + 1 up to n. I also had a friend who showed the notes from the last term and that helped clear some things up.

I hope everyone has a great weekend and preferably start studying for next weeks test, it did not seem too harsh since Prof. Heap mentioned that things involving complexity(steps, upper&lower bounds) won't be on the test.

Proofs & Complexity / 6th week

I'm uncertain on whether or not if we should've written a blog during the reading week, but I forgot anyways, and technically we didn't really 'learn' anything during the reading week, so I'm just going to let that one go.

Sorry about the lateness of this blog, my blogs are usually written on Wednesday but I was kept busy with my midterms and I kind of forgot, I promise that my next blog will be written on the Wednesday.

All non-course related materials aside, we started doing proofs that can get a bit more complicated and now we are not specifically told whether or not if the statement is valid. This requires us to do a little bit of extra work at the beginning figuring out whether or not if we want to prove, or to disprove the statement given. This is probably done by substituting in a bunch of examples, if the majority of them works then look for counter-examples that do not work.

Another thing we started this week is complexity, we actually did this on friday so if I'd written this blog on Wednesday it would not have been a part of this blog. I remember doing Complexity in CSC108 and talking about it brought back memories of that class. However, in 108 we simply talked about the program run time and how a program normally runs n times, but if you have a nested for loop the running time becomes n ** 2. We took it a 'step' further in class and talked about steps. So far it seems like the complexity stuff is not too hard, all you have to do is break everything down into subgroups and add them all together to find out the total step of the run time.