Friday 26 September 2014

This week in CSC165, we started off with conjunctions, disjunctions, negation, and truth tables. For me this stuff was mostly understandable but there were times when I was just completely confused. I hope in this slog I will be able to elaborate more on what I was confused on.

So getting right into it, I mainly understood the material that was taught this week but what confused me was the part about tautology, satisfiable, and unsatisfiable. I understood that tautology is where a statement is completely true in every possible world, in other words where every example works. Satisfiable is where it is possible to make a statement true and have at least one example and unsatisfiable is when the statement is never true, meaning there are no examples that can satisfy the statement. What was confusing for me was the situation that was given on Wednesday's lecture. After looking at it again, I understand it a bit more but it is still quite confusing with the sets. On the other hand, the satisfiable and unsatisfiable situations ares easier to understand because the situations are more straight forward. For example the unsatisfiable situation says that there is a P(x) and not P(x) which is not satisfiable at all.

On another note, this week's tutorial was quite challenging. For the first question in the tutorial exercise I was confused about the first question because I did not really know how to convert the statements into symbolic form but it was actually fairly simple for example one of the questions was "No course is a prerequisite of itself", I understood that I was dealing with one course instead of two courses this time, also since it said No course, I immediately thought that it must be for all courses this is true. This then was actually pretty similar to part A in question one instead the course that does not have a prerequisite is itself so that means we would replace CSC108 with the prerequisite course. Most of the questions were pretty easy as I would get the right symbolic form but just in the wrong order. For example one of the questions was "Some course is not a prerequisite for any course", if we said "For every course, there exists a prerequisite course" then it would be wrong because we are not specifying one specific prerequisite course. Instead we would say "There exists a prerequisite course for every course" to specify one specific prerequisite course. Therefore sometimes order matters.

And this concludes this week's slog. It was a bit boring for me to write but I hope next week's will be better. Thanks for reading!

Wednesday 17 September 2014

SLOG - Week 1 of Classes

The first week of class was quite interesting. So far a lot of the material that has been covered overlaps with the material in MAT137, which helps me out quite a bit in terms of understanding the material. Our professor Danny Heap is also quite an interesting and funny. He brings the mood up in the class with light jokes here and there but at times he loses me during the lectures when he gets a little off-topic. Overall though he is a very nice professor.

On the first day of class was just mainly some housekeeping stuff like explaining the syllabus, Piazza, and SLOG. Though we did go over ambiguity and double meanings in sentences. The funniest one I thought was prostitutes appeal to Pope. I love how just by changing the context of the sentence, it can change the whole meaning of it.

Continuing onto the second day of classes, we went over sets talking about cases where For every X in a set and There exists an X in a set where something is true. The material that was covered was pretty straight forward. On Friday we talked about quantifiers, and how to verify/ disprove universal claims and also existential claims. For universal claims, to verify, we would check every element. To disprove them we would find at least one counter example. For existential claims, to verify we would find at least one element to prove that it is true. To disprove, we would have to show that all elements are counter examples. 

We also covered Venn diagrams to show when a statement was true where we would put a check mark to show that there are elements in this set or a X to show that there are no elements in this set. For example we would put a check mark in the intersection of S1 and S2 when we wanted to show that there is at least one element in S1 that was also an element of S2. 

Speaking of Venn diagrams, our first tutorial assignment was assigned and we had to draw one Venn diagram to show when the statement was true and another diagram to show when the statement was false. This wording of the question was very confusing for me because it said that T was the set of the three python programs in the previous question and P was the set of python programs that pass the three tests from the previous question. What made me confused was what set P. In the beginning of the question it said that "suppose we know nothing of the three python programs". I kept thinking that the set P was the same set of python programs that actually passed the test from the previous question. Though I finally figured it out that set P is literally just a set of any python programs that pass the three tests. There can be a number of them or perhaps only even one. After realizing this, I finally understood that I all I basically had to do was take a look at set T and see whether or not set T shared the same elements in set P. In other words, does a python program in set T pass all three tests or not? If so, it would belong in set P, if not, it would not belong in set P.

So much for a short paragraph right? Though after writing this slog I actually think I have a good idea on why we write these things. It really helps review our understanding. It's almost like teaching others, except I'm not. 

Sunday 14 September 2014

Welcome to my blog for CSC165! I don't know why writing a blog is necessary for this course but I hope to realize the purpose by the end of the course if not by mid terms. Anyways I hope my sarcastic humor will be interesting enough to keep you awake because I tend to go off on tangents like I am right now. Back on topic, I will be posting about what I have learned in CSC165 as well as my thoughts on the course if you didn't know that already which you probably do.

Anyways, thanks for reading and have a nice day. Or night.