Introduction and first month in CSC236

Welcome, dwellers of the internet, to the blog about my experiences in the Theory of Computation (CSC236).

Before I begin to talk about the first few weeks of coming back to proofs, I feel I need to introduce myself. My name is Wahaj, as implied by the URL. I am a 2nd year student specializing in Computer Science. Computer science, among many other things, is one of my passions. That said, proofs are definitely not one of my strong suits and I did not particularly enjoy CSC165. Other than computer science, I am very passionate about Hockey, European Soccer, and practically anything related to Space.

Now, let's talk about CSC263. After taking this course for about 4 weeks, I must say I am very surprised: this course has been significantly more interesting than CSC165. So far, we've been through almost 4 types of induction: Simple Induction/Mathematical Induction, Complete Induction, Well-Ordering, and Structural Induction. Mathematical induction is by far the easiest to understand, at least in my opinion. I believe this is mostly because it's working with equations and being able to manipulate them, which I happen to find quite fascinating. Complete induction was a bit trickier for me to understand, specifically regarding the fact that you assume that your statement is true for everything except the final case. However, once I got my mind around the whole idea, I have started to feel a lot more comfortable with it. Well-ordering induction was really easy to understand during the lecture but I feel I need to practice it a few times until I can say I am completely comfortable with it.

Structural Induction on the other hand, I am quite shaky about. Maybe it was because I was far more focused on finishing Assignment 1 on Friday but I felt it was by far the most difficult type of induction: I will definitely need more practicing on this one.

Now I don't want to talk too much about the assignment but I would like to talk about question 4. That question, while not being particularly that easy, was very interesting. It was all about figuring out all the possibilities there could be inside the binary string and that reminded me of my Battleship assignment for CSC148. Specifically speaking, the part of the assignment where we had to make the program automatically place ships on the board without arriving to any conflicts (without going off the board). That too, was all about analyzing the possibilities of where a ship can be randomly placed. I would like to preface this paragraph with the fact that I would like to imagine I made some significant progress in answering Q4, which could be a totally incorrect assumption.

That's all for this blog post. Hopefully, next week when I start posting regularly, it will be far smaller.

Cheers!