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.