SLOG - Week 2

    This week in CSC165 we continued on from last week in learning about logical statements and also got a great lecture on the basics of problem solving. This week in CSC165 we continued on from last week in learning about logical statements and also got a great lecture on the basics of problem solving. One thing I felt this week helped me with especially was translating statements from English into logical notation and vice versa. Being able to do this was emphasized in the tutorial and I felt very confident on the quiz with the knowledge I gained during the lectures. Something I had struggled with previously that I felt the lectures this week helped me understand to a much greater extent was negating implication statements, especially when they were written in English.

    The Friday lecture this week was by far the most interesting because instead of giving us examples and working through them with us Danny gave us a problem and let us work on it throughout the lecture. The purpose of this was to teach us how to go about problem solving, a very useful skill in computer science! I appreciated the approach to problem solving that Danny outlined for us and found it very efficient when it came to the problem. I liked how he emphasized making a plan before you actually start to carry it out, so then once you complete that plan you can look back on the results and see exactly where it didn't work, making it easier to go back and find a more rewarding approach.

SLOG - Week 1

This week in class we focused on proving and disproving different types of logical claims. I learnt the difference between universal claims, which evaluate if every element in a set 1 are also in a set 2, and existential claims, which evaluate if an element of a set 1 also exists in set 2. I found the knowledge of these topics applied greatly to the material we have covered so far in MAT137, which has been to do with evaluating sets and set builder notation. At first I wasn't totally comfortable with applying my knowledge of these types of claims in programming logic, through the use of any and all statements, but after playing around with sets in Python, the connection became obvious. I did have some trouble this week, mainly with picturing statements in the form of Venn diagrams. The lab helped clear this up a lot, the TA was very thorough in her explanations of the topic, and it made the lab quiz at the end trivial. After fully understanding the Venn diagrams, I also found this helped in my understanding of how to verify and falsify universal and existential claims, which is very obvious when you picture each set involved as either occupied or empty.