Week 3

Initially I was really confused by what we had learned in class this week however reviewing over the lecture slides helped me understand (or at least feel like I understand) what was taught. I can’t be certain that I have mastered the concepts covered in class this week however by reviewing over the lectures and working on the assignment, I will get a fair reflection of where I stand in this course.

Challenging Topics This Week

The thing that confused me the most in the lectures this week were the Venn diagrams. For explain, while working through the lecture we came across Slide 13 which asked to draw a Venn diagram showing which region(s) must not have any elements to still remain consistent with the implication that was given. I was very confused by this, (and I still am a little shaky with Venn diagrams) however, as we moved on we came across truth tables. I’ve seen truth tables before and I felt like this really helped me understand the implication. Personally, I like truth tables a lot better than Venn diagrams as they show all the possibilities of the implication and they are easier to create.

Tutorial

I found the tutorial this week to have some challenging parts but fairly straightforward. Question 2 of the tutorial was easy for me to understand and the first few parts of question 1 were also simple. It was near the end of question 1 where it got a little difficult and what I did not know was that to solve these, the simplest way is to introduce a third variable. Taking up these questions in the tutorial and listening to the explanation given by the TA really helped me.

New Topics I Learned This Week

Something new I learned this week would be what tautology, satisfiability and unsatisfiability are. Apart from that, I also learned the different laws in logic and set operations that are similar to the laws of arithmetic. This was easier to understand because it related to arithmetic and we have covered these laws many times over the years in different math classes.

Week 2

Two weeks into the course and so far I am understanding the topics we are learning. Hopefully I am able to keep up with the course and master the different concepts taught in class.

Relation to Other Courses

While reviewing over the week two lecture notes I came across implication and negation. These two topics looked familiar due to the fact that they were also covered in my MAT137 lecture and it helped me understand the concept. Another topic we briefly went over in MAT137 is vacuous truth. We are going to cover vacuous truth in CSC165 during Friday's lecture and knowing a little about it already will hopefully help me.

Tutorial

My tutorial Tuesday morning went fairly well. Coming into the tutorial, I was not sure if I completed the exercise correctly. However, my TA Jason went over the exercise very well and that helped me understand my mistakes. For question 2, there were some cases where I didn't use the minimum number of "X" or "O" combinations and there were cases where I didn't put one important "X" or "O". The main thing I took out of that lecture was the reference Jason used to describe how question two was supposed to be completed. He helped me clarify how to verify and falsify universal and existential claims. This was also explained on page five of the week two lectures. Thankfully, I understood the concept and hopefully completed the quiz correctly.

Week 1

The first week of class and university life in general was quite interesting. The difference between high school and university life is already evident. At first I felt like this would be a little overwhelming, however, I really enjoyed the first week as it was mostly introductions to the course material. This gave me a chance to adjust to this new lifestyle. Now on to more specific topics about this course:

New Topics I Learned This Week

First and foremost I learned about the importance of precision and the right level of precision. The ambiguity slide was really interesting and it helped me realize how the headlines provided can be interpreted in multiple ways by different people.

Challenging Topics This Week

Initially I was very confused by the streetcar drama exercise. I had absolutely no idea how to solve this. However, by working with my fellow classmates and using the problem-solving steps I was able to complete this question and at the same time understand how to approach problems that may seem difficult. The main difficulty I had with this question was realizing that the sum was not unique; somehow I managed to miss this important fact and without it I would not been able to solve the question.

Relation to Other Courses

I have MAT137 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday before I have CSC165. Therefore, before learning about quantifiers and universal / existential claims in CSC165, I was taught it in MAT137 which helped me understand the material very well. The course material in these two courses seems to be relative so far and I feel like this will help me understand several concepts.

Introduction

Hello!

My name is Jahid Ahmed and this is my CSC165 blog. This blog will feature my weekly experiences throughout this course.