The Course is Coming to an End

Wow I can't believe it has already come to an end...... This semester has been hectic, the challenges presented us in this course was extremely reasonable. The exam is the only thing left to do and I can't wait till it's over! I just want to thank Danny Heap for being an excellent professor and for making every class interesting so that I wouldn't dare to skip it. Anyways thanks to all the TA's for being such great help and providing us with such detailed explanations of our tutorial questions. Everyone, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Converting a DFSA to a Regular Expression

This past tutorial was intriguing, we were taught how to reduce a DFSA to its 2 state form. I found it extra intriguing how such a simple worded language could have generated such a complex regular expression. I used the tutorial quiz question from before to write up a step-by-step solution for changing a DFSA to a regular expression.

Assignment 3 .... *Sigh* and Pre-Exam

It was 9pm and as I stared at the clock, I realized that there was no way I could complete this assignment. Thinking back to what I was doing for the previous week, I was extremely disappointed in myself for allowing this to happen once again even though it is already my third year in UofT. I believed that if I had spent more quality time actually reading the course notes, I could have finished that assignment on time. I've realized that I come to learn concepts a week later because I don't spend any time outside of class studying like I should be doing. I become too attracted to things that aren't related to school which really interferes with my school work and this is a trait of mine that I really need to change in order to succeed. Even my SLOG is not constantly updated, I need to become more responsible with these scheduled tasks. Next week is already the final exam, I have to refresh my knowledge by going over things like time complexity, recurrences, correctness, termination, and loop invariants. These are all the topics that I still struggle but have such a little time frame to learn it all completely. Hoepfully, studying every single day for the next 4-5 days will be sufficient. Everyone GOOD LUCK ON YOUR EXAMS!!!

Forgot to update my blog :(

I completely forgot about the blog for a while because of the crazy loads of work for the past few weeks. I guess I'll just try to remember how I felt for the past few weeks. When the second midterm came, I was honestly extremely unprepared and didn't understand the recurrences and divide-and-conquer algorithms that we learned in class. Unfortunately, I only understood how to do unwinding but not completely. For some reason, I had a feeling that the geometric series was going to appear on the mid-term and it was the only tutorial lesson that I wasn't able to comprehend. I still have troubles finding a recurrence for an algorithm but after reading some parts of the course notes I'm feeling a bit more comfortable with it. Once again, I didn't expect the mark that I received for the test. In my opinion, I felt Paul was being too generous but I'm glad that he was otherwise my mark would be greatly affected. I am extremely behind on readings because of other courses and horrible time management skills and therefore I am having trouble following along in class. I find myself daydreaming nowadays because of the lack of sleep and I find that it's greatly affecting my learning experience at St.George. Today we were learning about FSA's and I felt so lost and I hope that I'll be able to catch up this weekend. It's probably also a bad thing that we missed our tutorial this week because it was one of the topics that I really don't understand. I need to go try to fully understand the tutorial solutions as soon as they're posted.

The Unexpected Result.....

Well the tests have been returned this week and turns out I didn't do as well as I expected. It turns out that what I thought was Mathematical Induction was actually Complete Induction and vice vers. Unfortunately that took a big toll on my marks, the third question was where all the problems were. I realized that after I left the exam room that in (e1 op e2), e1 and e2 could both have x integers thus my proof didn't work. I incorrectly assumed that e1 and e2 would be the last set of variables surrounded by a single set of brackets. My procrastination has actually gotten worse for the last two weeks, after this test was returned I got a wake up call to control my laziness. I really need to get a head start on the assignments, got so many things due next week. University is a pain to keep up with, I think I see a grey hair.

What a Relief......O.o!

Welcome back to my little blog it has been a week since my last post. Hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving and didn't gain too much weight from turkey :P This past week has been very challenging! I could barely sleep with all the assignments and midterms due all at once, I guess it was all my fault for being such a big procrastinator. Anyways, today was the big day, as I walked into the room I just felt the life force sucked out of me. It was so gloomy inside and outside the building which made things extra dramatic. When it was time to begin the test, I took one deep breath and started reading all the questions carefully. Let's just say that it was way more straight forward than I thought it would be. I'm so glad that I attended all those tutorials to get the solutions from the tutorial questions. All that extra work and studying really paid off at the end. I haven't felt satisfied with my tests for a long time but I think this was one of the best tests I've done in university. I am so glad that the load for this course will be lighter for at least a week so I can now switch focus to another course and start stressing there. Anyways I have so much work to catch up on, I'll probably write another short post this weekend. Hopefully we can all take it easy for the rest of this week.

First Impressions of the Course and Assignment 1

    Since this is my first entry of my very first blog, I've decided to begin by expressing how I feel about this course. To be honest, taking this course is really frightening. I was worried that I would get the same professor that I had before (I just couldn't follow along with the way he taught. I've had extremely great difficulties in the past and had to experience overwhelming stress. Seeing that Danny Heap was my instructor, it was as if I won the lottery. I've had Danny before for another course and he definitely explains course material and examples really well. Now back to assignment 1 handout, it seems that I really need to pay more attention to reading the question...let's just say that I was extremely confused reading question 1. It may seem ridiculous but it's probably because I haven't spent any time in summer doing educational things. I was reading the line "Use Complete Induction to prove that a^2 ternary tree...", I can't express the frustration I had while reading this part but after I realized that it was only a footnote rather than an exponent I just felt dumbfounded and laughed for 5 minutes. I've definitely learnt from my mistake and that next time I should analyse the page first. This year I am actually doing my homework and practice questions, also I've learned that attending tutorials does help! I've found that solving proofs actually bring a sense of accomplishment to me and now I can finally see why people need proofs. Well, this is the end of my very first entry, I hope you enjoyed reading about my experiences and please tune in next time for my next entry.