First past the post!

Ive started my first blog entry upto 3 weeks late. Oh well.

First, I will outline the structure of each blog post that I will make. Each post may contain any of the following sections:

- Thoughts on previous lectures
- Thoughts on assginment quesitons
- Discussion of difficulties encountered, and how they were resolved.
- Problem Solving (in particular, regarding at least one mathematical problem chosen from www.cgi.toronto.edu website).
- Any personal thoughts of my choice.

And now, onto my first post:
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Beginnings:

Im still not sure why it took me this long to form a SLog for this course. Perhaps its because I have often detested blogging; a lot of blogs I encounter don't serve much of a purpose for me, or hold my interest. This is not to say that I believe there are no worthwhile blogs out there; rather, there is a lot of bad blogs for every good one found.

In the end, I guess I would rather take my 6 - 11% than uphold this belief; so I'll bypass it for now, in the interest of my GPA.

Regarding the lectures and material so far, there isnt much for me to say at this point. The material can sometimes be a tad obscure (WOP for example), but its not overly confounding to the reader. What I particularly like about the lectures is Professor Heap's style; its highly engauging. In fact, I dont think I have ever participated in a course that is so engauging in my university career.

It really helps with my retention of this course; this means less reading time and more practical work time for csc236 (and other subjects). The only downside is that if one is very tierd at the beginnning of the lecture, sitting though such a session can be painful to sit through... It doesn't help that I picked the 6-9pm lectures.

As for the assignment, I am a tad uneasy about it. My original view of induction was a highly mathematical and symbolic one: induction involves lots of inequalities, variables, and should sicken and intimidate anyone with a weakness in mathematics.

Professor Heap mentioned that logical "prose" proofs can be used. And for questions one and two, I found myself using a lot of words, and it not being so easy to use exclusively symbols. With more wordy proofs, I feel more uncertain and ambigous; I guess I'm not entirely sure what marks I will get on this assignment.

They say that "good problems fight back". I found that a few of the problems in this assignment did just that. Finding solutions were particularly satisfying in the end. I cant wait for grammars and some of the more obscure computer science stuff later on in the course!

END.