test 2

The mark for test 2 were given in the class and i was pretty disappointed with my results. I guess i am ultimately to be blamed for unrealistically expecting too much (and normally i would be quite satisfied with a similar mark in a math test ) but i really thought i did well enough to get something in the range of 21-24. I realize i should have spent some more time practicing and less time procrastinating, and a glance at some complete induction proofs for recursive functions would definetly have given me an edge, i still feel bitter about it. I have to go all-out on a full drive to do well in test 3 in a couple of weeks.

assignment completed

I just had a nice session with my partner and we wound up neatly typing up our very informal solutions to whats now a very presentable proofs to our TA's. I believe we have done a decent job in all the questions. I however feel skeptical about how assured a potential skeptic might feel about our proofs to question 2. In particular proving that language L with even number of 1s is also a subset of the regular expressions was personally very hard to prove. I guess i in general struggle to prove theorems or lemmas which seem intuitively obvious at the first glance and cant automatically generate proofs for then at the top of my head. Having had Danny as a course instructor for 2 courses now, i realise how anal he is about simple intermediate steps ( for example, we always have to mention that addition is closed!! ) so i wont be surprised if we loose a couple of marks on question 2.

road to assignment 3

The last few days have been spent working on assignment 3. I did first 2 questions with relative ease. The course slides on lecture were of great aid in assisting me solve question 1. The loop invariants, preconditions and they both lead to post condition and its termination were better explained in 2 slides than in 5 pages of course notes!

I am currently unsure about question 3. My intuition is to proceed solving it using operations of union and concatenation and prove that a finite number of strings can be generated if a language is derived using those operations. I should talk to Danny in office hours regarding it.

Question 4 is a give away. :p

test and assignment

Assignment 2 grades recently came out and i was very proud of my mark. I thought that the marks we were docked on were pretty harsh and i intend to speak to danny about it soon as he seemingly approved of my solution when i showed it to him. The TA mentioned that the constants for question 2 should have been different, and i cant find a reason at the top of my head why that should be. Apart from that, this assignment turned out to be a smooth ride on the road, as was the first assignment.

The last week i think was academically the most brutal week of my life. I can now see a little sprinkle of logic of why my professors ( and even my mom ) had advised me against taking 6 courses in a semester. I guess this may as well hold me in good stead in my future years when the going gets even tougher, though i sure hope that i dont experience similiar horror of sleepless nights. The 3 midterms i had meant i had to compromise on one of them, and it unfortunately had to be the csc236 test. I could have done it a lot better if i had spend proper time going over some recursion proof techniques. My fears were realised when i saw my mark for it this week. Though i dint do too bad, it sure was a dip from the standards i usually set myself for.

Assignment 3 is now out and i had my first reading my partner over it. We found an amazing almost unrealised trick in one of the parts in question 2. I am not much of a bragger but i ended up feeling extremely pleased at myself for being able to figure it out and i sure see a lot of students taking the solution almost granted for it. At the end of the exercise, me and my partner ended up appreciating and even smiling at the originality of assignment questions danny comes up with. For whatever bizzare unscientific reason, solving for 236 assignments gives me the most satisfaction and perhaps even sense-of-admiration everytime i am able to formula a concrete proof to each of the questions.