I had a pretty easy time this week understanding the lecture material. I think this was mostly due to my prior exposure to using AND/OR/NOT in programming courses in the past, and after how much they drilled the concepts into our heads it was easy to think about them in terms of this logic course.
While I was working on CSC148 exercises, something that Danny said rang very true. After finishing a challenging exercise I felt a rush, and i enjoyed it so much that I immediately went onto the next week's exercise. I went at it for about an hour to no avail, and I should have probably slept on it after that since it was about 3 a.m. I was determined not to fall asleep until I finished it though so i stayed up another two hours until I finally cracked the problem in a way I felt was almost a cheat, but I was just happy that it finally worked. The lack of sleep was definitely worth the feeling of fulfillment that I after successfully coding that. The problem was to write a recursive function to map a function F into all the elements of a linked list and return a new linked list.
Friday, September 26, 2014
Friday, September 19, 2014
Venn Diagrams , Quantifiers, and Implications
While I've worked with Venn diagrams before, I've not been exposed to them as much as I feel like I will be this course. Its introduction in CSC165 and STA257 has made me re-evaluate the usefulness of Venn diagrams for more than just grade school material. I've brushed up using a couple youtube videos and wiki on its uses for more advanced topics.
The only area I felt a little uncomfortable over the first two weeks was about the empty set, and proving statements about the empty set. It didn't make sense intuitively that one can claim anything about the empty set and have it be true. However, with the acceptance of needing a counter example to disprove universal claims, I've come to accept, and embrace the fact that the claim "All unicorns are blue and purple with shiny eyes" is logically true.
I felt Danny did a great job in explaining implications, in that the best way for me to understand them and convert english to symbolic is to think about when certain statements will be false and work from there. I wish he had expanded on Truth tables as opposed to Venn diagrams when looking at whether /\ and => can be used in an equivalent manner. I found the difference much easier to grasp using truth tables than venn diagrams, but I suppose others might find Venn diagrams easier.
While I've worked with Venn diagrams before, I've not been exposed to them as much as I feel like I will be this course. Its introduction in CSC165 and STA257 has made me re-evaluate the usefulness of Venn diagrams for more than just grade school material. I've brushed up using a couple youtube videos and wiki on its uses for more advanced topics.
The only area I felt a little uncomfortable over the first two weeks was about the empty set, and proving statements about the empty set. It didn't make sense intuitively that one can claim anything about the empty set and have it be true. However, with the acceptance of needing a counter example to disprove universal claims, I've come to accept, and embrace the fact that the claim "All unicorns are blue and purple with shiny eyes" is logically true.
I felt Danny did a great job in explaining implications, in that the best way for me to understand them and convert english to symbolic is to think about when certain statements will be false and work from there. I wish he had expanded on Truth tables as opposed to Venn diagrams when looking at whether /\ and => can be used in an equivalent manner. I found the difference much easier to grasp using truth tables than venn diagrams, but I suppose others might find Venn diagrams easier.
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