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