WEEK 2  

Big Challenge

I am an international student, and this is my first year in Canada. All the things here for me is totally new and challenging. I make effort to adapt and adopt the brand-new language environment and professor’s style of lecturing in order to make myself and the other students in the same page. Interestingly, when I read classmates’ slogs, I found they encountered the similar problem with me, like Yahui Liu (http://yahuiliuslog165.blogspot.ca/2014/10/csc165-week-1.html). Although adaption is not easy, but I believe I can tackle this with my classmates together, and I can definitely gain and learn a lot in this process, not only academically.

What I Learnt

These two weeks the professor mainly talked about the transformation between computer language and human language in python, how to express quantifications in different ways (using quantifiers, Venn Diagrams, set relations, etc.) and implications. What made me happy was that the logic part overlapped some parts in MAT137, which was quite helpful for me to solidify the knowledge in both courses. 

The Difficulty and Solving

        In the first tutorial, we judged whether a statement was true or false, and drew the Venn diagram according to the situation. I was confused about whether we should draw an “O” in the Venn diagram.
For example:

Answer:

For (d) False: the statement is “all three python programs pass all three test suites”. At the beginning, I thought only an X in the region of T outside P was OK, because if I draw this X, this means, “no python program doesn’t pass all three test suites”, which was equivalent to the False statement. Thus, I could not figure out why there must be an O in the region of T inside of P.

After I found my problem, I devised a plan:
1) First, review all the slides and course note to get a better understanding in this part.
2) Then, summarize all the similar problems and see the difference between them.
3) If question still cannot be solved, consult TA about my confusion.
Finally, I solved this problem until I saw a quite similar problem on quiz 1. That problem didn’t have an O in the region of T inside of P because T can be empty set. But in the tutorial problem, we have already known that T = {there are three python programs}, which means T cannot be empty set. Therefore, there must be an O in the region of T inside of P.

Using the method suggested by Polya, I tackled the difficulty myself, which inspired me a lot, and interested me keenly to learn more on CSC165.