SlOG11 -last one

The course is just finished, without any prepare.

The 11 weeks' lecture have given me a lot, from knowledge to insights in life.

11 weeks is a short time for one semester, at least for me. Back in high school and middle school, even in elementary school, I used to have about 20 weeks of courses. I have to say that the rhythm in university is so fast that it forces you not to slack off. Once you procrastinate a little bit, everything falls on you, seriously.

No one is really forcing you doing works, or going for lectures, but you have to do them by self consciousness, or you will not do well on tests, unless you are a genius. I know this might be said by lots of students, but this is what I actually experience. In addition, every single mark is important. One may think that "Oh, this test/quiz is only worth 4%, I can still do well in this course as well as I do well in the final." This kind of thought is dangerous, because the final is usually harder, and one may always overpredict their marks, causing 1 or 2 percent away from 4.0.

Knowledge is what I learned the most in this course. Mathematical logic becomes pretty important as I went through this year, so I am very glad that I have taken this course. Besides, I also recommend people taking it. The load of this course is not very heavy, and the course helps you to build logic, in an effective way. It is really useful!

Insight in life I learned from this course comes from the first term test. In part 1 second section if I remember correctly, I got all the answers right, but still lost many marks. It was because of reasoning was not very complete even though I think they are obvious. The instructor told me that to be as precise as possible when writing reasons, because the TAs can not read my mind if I skip a little bit. I think this applies not only in tests, but also in everyday life.

Finally, thanks for reading if you got to this line. Hopefully can see you someday. xD

SLOG10

This is the last week of course. I do not know how many times I have already said this, but I have to say that time pass so fast, especially when you are into what you are doing. And this happens in CSC165 I think.

The final week for this semester is about countablilty and induction proof. Countabiliy seemed stranger at first, meaning a little bit hard to understand intuitively. However, after some examples, such as "the set of natural numbers and the set of odd natural numbers have the same size", it made more logical sense to me at least.

Last Tuesday the school was closed for fall break so we did not have a lecture, and I thought we were not supposed to write a SLOG. However, this week when I ask our professor, he said that actually we needed one. His reason was that even we did not have a class, we were still learning, in someways, and everything I learned can be put here. I guess he was right. We should not just do the work for marks, but we are doing it for ourselves.

SLOG9

Every week's lecture has been understandable, until the last hour of this Tuesday.

It might not be that exaggerated, but it was like something really confusing. You do not know where it comes from, but you have to understand it.

The topic was about computability.

Maybe it is just because I am not smart enough. What I heard from many of my friends who had already taken CSC165 in the first year, was that this was not a hard course until the very last chapter. And this is totally what I feel after this week's lecture. To be honest, I actually understood the topic and followed every step the professor took and explained. However, even I think I followed and understood, it is still like a mess in my head.

Just now I went over the lecture notes again, and it made more sense as I went through it. I think it may be because I am influences by others' words, and the content itself may not be that hard. I hope I can handle it in the next lecture which is next next week..

The test was handed back, and it was a little bit lower than I expected. And I wrote a full page for remarking issues which I claimed that some points I deserve to have. Hope I can get them back.

It is so fast that 10 weeks of school has already passed, and there is only one lecture left. Fight for final~

SLOG8

Our second term test was finished this Tuesday. It went better than my first term test, and I hope the result can be as expected. And the following two hours of lecture was mainly about practicing problems of big-Oh. It seemed that we were just repeating the same kind of problem with different numbers substituted. However, I believe professor picked specific questions for reasons.Indeed, practice is the key to success, which is what I learned after finishing first year.

A very important concept I found studying big-Oh or other proofs is backward thinking, which reminded me of my childhood. When I was still in elementary school, I loved to play maze. There were books about different kinds of mazes which always took me lots of time. At that time, my father told me sometimes it was easier to start from the end point. That was the first moment I started backward thinking.

Recently, I read a piece of news about a old Japanese man who spent almost 7 years drawing a maze by hand, and when I actually saw the picture of maze, I was like ^%%@&*#(^@%@^%#**&&*@*()*@@@#$$.....here is the maze:


.......

I wonder why he drew this..maybe everyone has his own resource of happiness. =)

SLOG7

I cannot believe that two-thirds of the semester has already passed, and for the upcoming next week, we have an assignment due and second test, which is going to be a busy week.

The later part of this week's lecture was pretty interesting. We were given a question as the following:

The logic works very well by backward thinking, which appeared in my mind after trying different ways for several minutes. The answer is any number in the range (0,64) is possible to achieve. However, as a follow up, it is not true for every number of pennies in the left drawer. As far as I concerned, obviously the odd numbers cannot, as well as the numbers divisible by 2 but result in an odd number also cannot. This made me think about: Should the number of pennies be a number that is 2 to the power of a natural number so that every number in that range is possible to achieve? And is this an if and only if relationship? Therefore, I asked the professor. He said he was not sure at that time, and suggest me to try to prove it by myself. I have many tests these weeks so I may try it after I finish my tests, and I will post my prove in my slog!

SLOG6

This week we learned something totally new for me, but I will talk about it in the later part.

When the lecture began, we saw a very interesting problem, which was the "Four Color Theorem". It said that four colors are enough to color any map(separation of a plane), so that no two adjacent regions have the same color.

At first I thought it was just a hard proof question, so I started thinking. However, then the professor showed the next slide with something like "first introduced in 1850s, and got proved in 1970s. It was the first computer-assisted proof". Then I was like......

Personally, I feel that it was crazy to stay at your room every day, thinking about how this proof can be done, even it may take years, even centuries. However, I feel very respectful to those who spend almost their life time on researches. Without the devotion from them, science could never develop.

After, 2 to 3 weeks, finally we are done with the proof part of the course. The material I said I never knew before was called Algorithm Analysis and Asymptotic Notation. I do not know how to explain what exactly it means even though I got every single idea the professor talked and explained in class. But I think I will do fine.

We have a test and an assignment due right after next week, and I have a hard test next week..Hope I can handle them =).

SLOG5

I cannot believe that it is already the sixth week of the school, meaning that half of the courses are already done.(We did not have slog in the first week, and it is the fifth one I am writing).

This week we got our first term test back, which was taken the week before. The average was about 80 percent, which was higher than I, and also our professors had expected. I did not as well as I expected. I lose some marks which were not supposed to be lost, because my answers were write, but the reasoning I put down is too brief to be understood, even I had a clear reason in my head. This was very pitiful.

The content we studied continued on proofs. As far as I concerned, I am okay with the ideas but have to be careful with the format. However, I should not be that confident because there is a big chance that professors give a question on the test in the future  that I totally have no idea how to solve. So I have to be modest and keep practicing in order to achieve a high grade in this course.

During the lecture, the professor gave out questions and let us think about them. Sometimes when I was still working on questions, he started to analyse the problems. I did not know whether it was me being slow or it was him being too fast. And occasionally, I was pretty surprised by the solution he gave about the proof even he explained it step by step. I wonder how he could came up with that "first idea". Probably it takes time to see more questions in order to become proficient.