SLOG 6

The first week back from reading week (which we didn't have any CSC165 homework to do over, which is nice) we continued talking about proofs, and we also learned about different techniques on how to solve proofs, and then began discussing counting the steps of a program. I found this part pretty hard, even on the first day of the new topic, so I can't even imagine how hard the next topic in CSC165 will be. To my understanding, the way to count the steps of an algorithm and calculate the run time is to first determine how many times a line will execute for a set of size n, and then add each line together. The hard part is actually determining how many times each line will execute, as that part can be tricky, especially with nested loops.

Also this week we had our regular tutorial and quiz. I felt pretty confident with the material on proofs, but my structure is quite horrible, which lead me to doing poorly on the quiz this week. I really wish that proofs only required you to do the math to actually prove something, and that all the "assume", "then" statements could be left out. I think this would make it much simpler, but I guess that's not the way it is. 

I also began working on assignment 2 with my partner. Some of the proofs seemed straightforward, but the last two were quite hard. I found structuring my proofs to be a bit challenging. From my perspective the proofs I wrote were fairly good, but they actually were pretty weak. I guess you have to treat proofs as if the person reading it has no knowledge of the math you are using to complete the proof, which requires you to be very detailed and write comments where they are needed. Overall, the second assignment was harder than the first one, but it did give me a lot of practice with proofs, which is a good thing.