Log Three

I haven't been able to update my blog recently due to all my midterms being this past week, so I'll try my best to recap the last two weeks. For the first assignment, even though the marks have not been updated yet, I was able to get a good look at the solutions that were given out during one of the lectures. The questions themselves did not seem to be too difficult when I was working on them, but after seeing the correct answers, I know that I probably did not do as well as I expected. The main issue was translating statements from English to a symbolic form. I can't really suggest any good ways to deal with this, other than lots of practice. Even if I figure out one symbolic form of a statement that seems correct, it seems that there are always better ways to describe the statement.

The midterm however was relatively simple compared to the assignment. Almost all of the questions were straightforward and not too complicated. The aid sheet was not really required for the test, but it helped in confirming some of the conversions and definitions.

Learning about proofs was probably the hardest part of these two weeks for me. Although I've done a lot of other types mathematics in the past, proofs were never something that I liked or was good at. It will probably get easier for me to do later on if I get accustomed to the structure of proofs used by this course. Most of the questions reviewed mainly involved taking a universal statement, or one that is stated in the question, and manipulating into the end result. Keeping that in mind when proving should also be useful for the basic direct proofs. As for any other types of proofs, hopefully more techniques will be shown in future lectures to help with those proofs.

Log Two

This week was a lot more challenging than the previous one, mostly due to the tutorial exercises and further application of the "implication" sign. Although the majority of the tutorial questions were simple to understand, it was harder to visualize answers for questions like "no course has more than two prerequisites". Compared to universal and "there exists" types of claims, questions that involve specific numbers seem to have much more complicated answers. This becomes an even bigger problem for me when the "implies" sign is used as I don't have any prior experience in utilizing it, making it easy to mix it up with the conjunction sign. It'll probably get easier to understand with more practice, which means this will be less of an issue as time goes on. As for the rest of the lectures, I've worked with circuits and logic in the past so most of the laws and concepts are just review.

Log One

First few days in CSC165 and everything is moving along smoothly. So far none of course work, concepts, and quizzes have proved to be too challenging. Everything up to this point has simply been a brief review of general concepts. Hopefully there will be many more interesting topics to come as the course goes on.