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.