Midterms/Program Correctness

Finally just finished up all my midterms; was quite the busy week since I had a number of assignments thrown in there as well. And the cycles of tests and assignments begins again before finals.

Just finished week 7. We looked at program correctness; preconditions/post-conditions. Monday we had a guest lecturer. Nick from UTSC. I thought he was great. He was very friendly, funny and knowledgeable. I actually felt bad for him, he was up making some jokes, trying to engage the class but few people seemed impressed. Monday mornings perhaps?

The rest of the week we worked through some binary search examples and greatest common divisors; which were more proofs by induction!

Problem Set 4 and Assignment 2 are due Monday. Still have to finish up both of them. I started assignment 2 earlier this week; but still have to do a bulk of the work. I mostly read through the questions and jotted down some thoughts mostly to get my thinking process going.

Test 1 Thoughts

Some quick thoughts on Test #1: 3 questions, 8 marks each. The first one was a binomial expression which I attempted to solve via simple induction. I'm fairly sure this is the right flavour to use for this question; except I got stuck on the induction step and couldn't figure out how to show P(n) --> P(n+1). I probably spent a little too much time on this question.

Question 2, with the Fibonacci sequence. I used complete induction. I don't totally remember the question. In my head I think i'm getting it confused with #1 and mixing the problems. I think it was F(n)^2 > 2n? Or something of that nature. Using complete induction, my proof went something like this; I showed the F(n) is the sum of F(n-1) and F(n-2) [by definition], which are both greater than 2(n-1) and 2(n-2) respectively [by IH]. Since F(n)'s predecors were both greater than 2n it should follow F(n) also.

Question 3, I'm drawing a blank on what the question was. I do remember running out of time since I spent a little much time thinking about #1's induction step. I think I started out using simple induction and then realized I should've used complete induction. I ran out of time to fix this and to finish the proof, but I had a structure of a proof and I put down some ideas of how to solve it.

Overall I felt prepared for the test, I just ran into a the problem of not being able to see the induction step for #1 which cost me some time. I always feel a little rushed when writting a 50min test. But I can't complain, everyone else is in the same boat and a few people seemed to have finished and left the room with some time to spare.

Assignment 1 Marks and Test Prep

Just got back the marks and feedback for A1. I was fairly pleased with my marks. Only question I really lost a lot of marks was 3b, since I wasn't too sure which part from 3a to use. But all in all I'm pleased with how things went.

Seems like A1 was due yesterday and now midterms are coming for all my courses. I'm not too worried for Friday. I've been keeping up with all the readings and lecture material so I should be fine. Just going to go over some exercises and through the slides. Time for some reading!