SLOG #5

This week we finished up chapter 3, and there were a couple things we went over. We further discussed proof of limits, which was certainly lots of help, considering the problems I had with the material prior to this week. There was also proof by cases which was somewhat new, and the example we did wasn't all that hard to grasp, so no problems there. The last thing for this chapter was disproving, which other than the approach, had nothing too hard or difficult. So ending for this chapter wasn't too bad, and other than a few rules of inference to review, everything looks good. Towards the end of the week, we began to chapter 4 and got introduced to some new material. As of now, it is clear that this chapter will focus on running-times for various programs, how we can measure them, and maybe learning steps to increase their efficiency. The introductory stuff looks pretty easy, and even though it is bound to get harder, i'm very much looking forward to this chapter.

SLOG #4

In my last post I stated that chapter 3 was quite easy to grasp, and it was! However, with the introduction of new material during the week of February 11th, there was a definite jump in difficulty for this chapter. Initially    we went through structure and some simple examples, but with this new stuff we went more in depth with harder and more advanced problems. There were couple things that proved challenging. For example using more of the definition associated with a specific predicate in a problem proved troublesome, because first there was realizing when is a good time to use the definition and next how to incorporate it into your solution. Another challenge was the proof about limits, and particularly the problem that we went through in the lecture, where we had change around the equation to make things work out. In both scenarios, the difficulty was mostly due to my inability to approach the problems and the lack of specific knowledge required to solve them. So the best solution was practice, and after going through similar problems a couple of times, I got familiar with techniques required for each type of problem, which made the problems much easier to deal with.