Proofs

A short haiku about proofs:

We did proofs this week.

I finished them all quite fast.

I still have more work.

Assignment 2 is officially over. Surprisingly, I found it easier relative to the first assignment. With proofs, once you figure out the crucial step, the rest of the proof writes itself. The crucial step is easy to find in most questions due to the nature of the question. They have obvious answers as to whether they are true or false which presents huge hints as to what the crucial step should be. Nevertheless there were some questions that took intensive thought and pen/paper to work out.

What I found challenging was incorporating the definition of MOD and GCD into the proofs. I've always had a hard time expressing my ideas clearly on paper. I'd say that I've improved since the beginning of the course.

The next part of the course will be focusing on the complexity of algorithms; this is probably one of the most important aspects of computer science since a program’s effectiveness is not solely based on functionality, but heavily on efficiency. I had a decent start to this next portion of the course, I understand the thought process that must go through one’s head when engaging a complexity problem. However, I’m not 100% clear on the part where you simplify the equation to only one variable and the part where you over count a variable. (n – 1  into n). I’ll keep working on it, but I’m going to end this post here. On a side note, I really need to keep up with these posts; the last few weeks have been quite hectic and I never got around to updating my Slog.

Hmmm, need to work on my time management.