Term Test and Tutorial

    This week in class, we continued the topic of bounding sorts and explored big Oh proofs a bit more detail. As stated last week, the actual proofs for big Oh aren't especially challenging for me, however I am still having issues with looking given code and writing equations that bound it, particularly from below. This week's tutorial was certainly helpful for me, however I believe that I scored poorly on the last part of the quiz. Even worse (or perhaps better), I figured out the solution in my head on my way out of the Bahen Centre. This may be a good sign of my grasping of this concept, however I feel that further practice in tutorial  and for homework is most definitely needed.

    We also had our term test this week on Wednesday. I think it went OK for me, out of the three questions I feel quite confident about two. I am, however, bothered about the second question (the almost epsilon-delta style statement), I had a solution in my head and I knew how the proof was supposed to go but there was one issue with the floor function which I could not seem to overcome. Later, in Prof. Heap's office hours, we went through it together and I was missing one easy step that I knew fully well how to do (maybe my sleep deprivation is catching up with me). I do hope that my proof structure and the steps that I wrote are worth some of the 10 possible marks for that question and that I earned a more than mediocre mark. I suppose only time will tell, I will post about the results in my next entry.

In addition, I found this person's slog entry rather interesting.
http://juliaslog.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/a-series-of-unfortunately-inconclusive-events/

Although the problem solving episode was inconclusive, their thought to use python to gain a greater understanding of the problem was quite fascinating for me as I quite often find myself working out some problems using python. Perhaps this is as a strategy I will use in future problem solving episodes.