SLOG Week 2

As I am approaching the end of week 3, I have found that the difficulty of this course has risen exponentially and is not as easy as I thought it would be. To put it in terms of the English translation of the foreign symbolic language that we have been learning these past few weeks, "There exists an element in the set of CSC165 lectures that has a difficulty level of hard".

To be honest, this past week of CSC165 lectures, although enjoyable, have made my brain want to explode. The concepts, despite being clear, were turned into a ball of confusion after the introduction of additional symbols with their meanings and implications as well as how weird they look compared to their English counterparts. I often found myself rigorously reading through the notes before and after class to make sure I understood everything.

One of the things I would say that I have learned aside from the ability to better interpret symbolic language would be the importance of tutorials. Having attended the second tutorial, I found that I completely understood how to do the worksheet whereas before I was unsure of my answers and did not know in what way I could manipulate the symbols to make a phrase semantically correct. To top it off, I even managed to get 100% on the quiz which was quite an accomplishment for me as I had walked into that tutorial thinking I had no chance of passing. It was here that I was also able to realise and get a better understanding of the difference between "^" and "if-then" statements.

SLOG Week 1

These past two weeks have been both enjoyable and somewhat challenging. I was particularly fascinated by the street car example due to the level of thought needed to solve a problem when not every single detail is revealed to you; demonstrating the amount of depth to which I must think in order to become a successful programmer in the future. Probably the most challenging thing I have encountered during these first two weeks is grasping the logic behind contrapositives and converses. Understanding the implications of the if-then statements were simple since they were straightforward however, the contrapositives and converses proved to be far more confusing and thus it was a lot harder for me to determine whether something was implied by them in a given scenario. In order to overcome this difficulty, I read the contrapositive and converse statements out loud multiple times for each scenario to solidify my ability to read the symbols and then reasoned with myself to determine whether any information was given, and if not, why. In addition I rewrote the statements on a separate sheet of paper so that I could compare the converses and contrapositives and the information they gave for each scenario. In the end, I realised that the implications and contrapositives gave the same results and for any information to be given from the proposed scenarios, the if statement must be fulfilled (true) or the then statement has to not be true.