Week 8, part 1.

Well, this has been a ridiculous week (as a testament to that: as of now, I have spent 40 consecutive hours without any sleep at all).
I have to say, these last few lectures haven't been very interesting to me, for two reasons. Most of it was done in csc165 (not just the concepts - even a lot of the examples). In fact, the only things I can think of from this course, that weren't treated in csc165 are: the master theorem, the equivalence of the 3 principles, and the "find a decreasing sequence of natural numbers" method for proving loop termination (which, by the way, was explained very well. I didn't really fully understand it until yesterday).
And since it feels like someone is drilling a hole in my head, I will continue this when I wake up.

Week 7.

I did not go to week 6's lecture (I had to finish my 207 assignment) so I felt it would have been somewhat dishonest to write a blog entry. I also had nothing to say. But this week went pretty well, even though there was nothing really new. The gcd algorithm and it's proof would have been much more interesting if I hadn't encountered them about 5 times before. It would be hypocritical to complain about the slow pace of the course; however, since if the workload was any heavier I would not be able to keep up.

Week 5.

Grade-wise, this was a good week in CSC236, but I am a bit disappointed because I could have done better. I did not get 8/8 in the problem set because the "P(n)" predicate symbol was missing. But the statement of the predicate I was trying to prove was still there, so this annoyed me.

I was fairly happy with assignment 1, but in the second question I had forgotten to prove that my algorithm for generating the cycles produced every possible menu.

I thought the test was easy. Two of the questions were very straightforward induction. I am a bit concerned with my argument of a certain point in the other question, but I doubt it will affect me much.

I was very pleased with the explanation of how one could get the closed form formula for calculating the nth Fibonacci number. It disturbs me when I see some result that is "pulled out of a hat" in math books.

Week 4.

The week 4 lecture was ok. Well, at least the first two hours were. The stuff about recursive functions and the Fibonacci numbers was pretty interesting. The Fibonacci pattern (the one with the sum of the first n numbers) was pretty easy to guess, especially since Prof. Heap had posted it in his blog a few days before the Thursday lecture.

In the third hour it became very hard for me to pay attention, but I think I'm getting better in this respect (two weeks ago I spaced out after just one hour).

At some point, when we were proving the time complexity of the recursive binary search, the lecture became slow and the class was not contributing at all. And then Prof. Heap stopped talking for about 10 minutes. I thought we had angered him (it reminded me very much of a lecture in first year where no one had done the required reading, and the professor got very disappointed and dismissed us all). I felt really bad. Then, it turned out that we were supposed to be jotting down our attempts at solving a problem, like usual. I had not been doing anything, and so I felt even worse.

These evening sessions are killing me.