It's been a while since my last post. Having a full course-load, a job, and having to commute for 2.5 hours each day makes this whole log-keeping process a challenge, as there's simply no time to fit this into the schedule. I was finally able to put some time aside today to write a few things about CSC236.
So, we've covered a considerable amount of material so far. Induction, recursion, complexity, completeness, and now we've starting exploring formal languages and regular expressions. Induction and completeness seem like very interesting concepts, and relatively useful. Complexity, unfortunately, is something that I still am having problems understanding. I've to, somehow, find some time to put in more work in that area of CSC236 and catch up.
The 2nd midterm was held last Friday. Seemed like a fair test. The completeness questions were interesting, and the last one was a bit of a challenge as there wasn't a useful invariant(that I could see, at least) that would be useful in proving the termination of the loop.
The assignments, on the other hand, have proven to be very difficult for me. Maybe I lack the thorough understanding that's required to solve those questions, or maybe the questions are simply very difficult. I don't know. What I do know though is that trying to tackle and expect to complete the assignment on my own does not seem like a very good idea anymore. For the coming assignment, I'll have to consider pairing up with someone or getting some help from the TAs/profs, both of which are relatively unfamiliar concepts for me. More things to get used to, it seems.
Time constraints coupled with the ridiculous workload of the other courses I'm taking this semester have lead to my missing the last couple of lectures, which is unfortunate as formal languages and especially regular expressions are things that interest me. Another set of things to add to my "236 catch-up" list.
Looking forward to the next few lectures.
Signing out.
PS. I'm hoping the next assignment is a bit more "sane" than the previous.
Monday, November 10, 2008
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