CSC165 Week 3-4, Converting Symbols to English and Back Again

What's up everyone, this is just me checking back in to bring you a little weekly round up of week 3-4 of CSC165. This week was heavily based on the contents of chapter 2 in our course notes. Special emphasis was placed on converting specific English operators into symbols and vice versa. Generally, I found this week to have been very challenging compared to last week. It took me a lot longer to grasp the concepts of this week's lectures. Maybe I need more practice converting  from English to symbols and back again but I found that I had difficulty knowing when to use for all, for some, and how to incorporate implications, disjunctions and conjunctions into a symbolic statement. The tutorial definitely helped me a lot though, and I felt pretty confident that I knew what I was doing after it ended. At the end of this week professor Heap presented us with quite a difficult problem. We had to find a recursive pattern that would help us predict the number of up and down creases would be produced by folding a piece of paper left to right over and over again. This definitely made me look back and use the steps to solving a problem more rigorously and with the help of two partners we made decent headway into the problem. Though we haven't been able to come up with a full mathematical solution we essentially have a pattern and all that needs to be done now is just write up a recursive sequence for it.

Well that's it for this week's SLog report. I hope all of you have enjoyed reading about my week and comment below; did you guys have had the same difficulties as I had or  did  you just find this week easy and maybe I'm the one who needs to step it up?  Good luck with everything next week, this is Kyle Mendoza signing out.

CSC165 Week 1 and 2

Hey everyone! Welcome to my blog for CSC165. This is going to be the first of many posts to be coming at you so make sure to check my blog out frequently for updates on my experiences in this course. These first few blog posts will mostly outline the material covered during the first weeks of CSC165, including topics that I couldn't understand, concepts that took me longer to understand, and things that I've learned about logic and reasoning that have made me more aware of the importance of word choice.

So for the first two weeks I was introduced to the world of advanced logic and mathematical reasoning. I have to admit that for the first two or three sections I had trouble understanding the terminology that was being taught. However, after a while I was able to catch on to all the lingo and was actually beginning to properly learn. Surprisingly I found the concepts of existential and universal claims relatively easy to understand and I was able to easily distinguish between the two and determine what was needed to either verify/falsify both claims. Also, learning about quantifiers and the way that they help specify certain claims and transform them from open sentences to statements was also very interesting. What I think I had the most difficulty understanding in the first two weeks in this course was knowing the difference between a converse and a contrapositive and knowing whether they were true and false. Also, for some statements, it was extremely challenging trying to find the antecedent and consequent when they were not obviously indicated with an "if/then" statement. To wrap this up, I find it quite unusual that a program such as computer science has a course that has hardly anything to do with technical computer programming but everything to do with the connection between English and programming language and symbols. But at the same time, I can see why I have to take it. To be a successful computer scientist, I have to be able to express myself with clarity and know when precision and ambiguity is needed. That being said, I look forward to everything that I will be learning in this course