Lecture 12

Yeah so basically when I was posting up all that i had saved in my word file.... i realized that I did not write a Slog for week 8 - 12....hey! i blame the computer science course load. But well i'm ready to get marks deducted for not writing em. And here I am writing my last Slog 3 minutes before the final deadline....

Exam week is going to be hell and i Hope we never get 4 exams in a row again. I hope i do well in my courses which is quite unlikely. Danny Heap me being very honest... you are a great professor... For one thing you remember my name :) thanks for 236 and 165 ... au revoir

Lecture 7

By now i'm pretty familiar with recursion and this was another recursion filled recursion. With binary search (ahh yes it brings back memories). But WAIT! we didn't use the basic induction structure to prove anything... we basically had to use the pre-condition to prove the post condition. Well actually we had to prove that the recursive statement terminates... that is reaches the base case and finally returns something. This kind of took long...even while i was practicing it took atleast 2 pages to do. But it was infact easiar than certain proofs that i have done.

PROBLEM SET 4 AND A2!! i'm doomed... :P

Lecture 6

Good ol’ sorts…. I like how these old topics keep showing up….its good to see that I have something to begin with…. And its not something totally new.
This is going exactly as my first blog had predicted… muahahahaha.
As soon as merge sort appeared on Danny’s slides… I thought to myself ….hey merge sort that’s the first program I wrote to understand recursion. Et voila! On the next slide Danny had used recursion to do his merge sort . In this lecture we basically learnt to uwind recursive statements sort of like what we did to get the output of certain recursions in CSC 148. But then we stuck to the induction structure and that brought us on track and the unwinding made a lot more sense. Once again a successful 236 lecture. :)

Lecture 5

DIY Closed forms, closed forms, millions of variables …. this was my reaction when I skimmed through the lecture slide. Maybe that’s the reason the text has more explanation than hard core logic and proving because this scares me. Well I think I finally have to start reading my text properly .
Trees were the things that were in my nightmares since 148 and they’re back!!! Well I think I have to read these notes about twice….once to get over my fear …and the second to actually understand them.
But binary trees are easy to understand. Since we’re not going to write a program making trees and iterating through them… they don’t scare me so much anymore. But I still don’t understand them well enough. Hence I shall read the text…. tomorrow.

Assignment 1 was quite disappointing.

Lecture 4

The topic of recursion made me happy again because we had used it so many times in CSC148 and maybe a couple of times in CSC165. The easy way of understanding them was basically understanding how to use the induction structure to prove the recursive statements. The book tends to use way too many words. Explains it right but the lecture notes are good enough as they somewhat summarize what the book is trying to tell us. Doing the Fibonacci proof was basically the one thing that made me understand proving recursive statements.
About the mid term, I think I should have attempted the second question. The thought that I mite not be able to complete it and get lesser than even 20% on the question made me write “ I do not know how to attempt this question” but after writing the test it felt like I could’ve easily finished it in maybe 8 minutes. The other 2 questions weren’t all that hard.
Confession: I haven’t really read a lot of my text yet…

Lecture 3

Other than Simple Induction, We learnt Complete Induction and Principle of well ordering.
In complete induction for all n which belongs to a natural number, we basically assume all the cases from 0 to n - 1 and then we prove for n using the assumption.
At first I didn’t really understand the principle of well ordering…but after going through the lecture slides and re-reading the Round Robin Domino example…it wasn’t as intimidating as it seemed when I first saw it.
Complete Induction seemed just like an upgrade on simple induction and wasn’t all that hard to grasp.
The Assignment was pretty hard. Honestly we should have started a bit earlier considering this to be our first CSC236 Assignment.

Lecture 2

Didn’t attend this weeks lecture. But got lecture notes from the net.