Week 8, part 2

The second reason is that I never much liked proving correctness and time complexity bounds. Correctness isn't so bad, but all time complexity proofs that we have done so far have been fairly simple, but very long. Even in math, I never liked proofs that took so much longer to write formally than to go through in your head.

I find that whenever I try to participate in the lectures (i.e. answering questions), it's much easier for me to pay attention, and I get much more from the lecture. The downside of that, is that inevitably I say something really stupid and embarrassing from time to time. For example, last time I said "it must reach 0" (when we were doing loop termination proofs, and were asked what was so special about decreasing sequences of natural numbers) and if I remember correctly, Danny corrected me and said that it has a smallest element.

Although that's not really relevant; every sequence of natural numbers has a smallest element by the principle of well ordering. What we need to prove termination is that it's finite, and that's what the "decreasing" part gives us.