Week 3!

This week went by faster than usual. At first I thought I was the only one who had trouble understanding some things in this class, but after reading a few more blogs, I'm not sure whether or not its reassurance that everyone else is in the same boat too. Anyway, out of everything we did, lecture 3 on Friday with Prof. Heap was the most interesting. Instead of the usual slides and feelings of uncertainty, we were exposed to a Folding exercise. We were told to work in groups of two or three and begin our intensive problem-solving session. I talked to the girl beside me to ask if she wants to work together with her friend and myself, leading to another familiar face to talk to in a class full of strangers. The three of us were all so focused that an hour of trying to solve this problem seemed like 15 minutes. We went from small to big, working from 1 fold to 4 folds, and finally understanding the pattern the 5th fold would make.

It started like this:

(D - down | U - up)

1st fold: D

2nd fold: U D D

3rd fold: U U D D U D D

4th fold: U U D U U D D D U U D D U D D

Looking at it that way, arrving to the solution would've been fairly difficult, but once you change the way its set up, the pattern is easier to see and understand. Observing the positions of each vertex as the next fold is made was important too. There was a middle portion that would always remain down.

Someone else proposed the idea of creating a sort of pyramid left us to this: 

                            D

                    U D D

                U U D D U D D

U U D U U D D D U U D D U D D

Looking at it now makes a lot more sense, the orange and blue parts are exactly the same as the row above, but are sort of like mirror-copies. 

I'm not even sure if I would have been able to reach this on my own. 

So that was week 3, looking forward to more workouts like these

Initial Thoughts (Weeks 1 & 2)

Sitting in the first class,  without officially being enrolled in this course and not really knowing what outcome to expect, it seemed like I didn't belong at all. The professor seemed pretty cool so that helped. We started off with ambiguity, a term I hadn't really paid much attention to at first. Moving on to precision and balance, I got an idea of what's being conveyed here. Proofs and sets came as previously understood topics, but only later on in the lectures did I realize how precise and in depth we were getting into about what is usally taken as a simple statement. What is true and what is false? How do you know? What proof do you have? Everything required you to clearly comprehend the problem, plan, work to the solution, and finally review it.

We were introduced to universal claims and existential claims, what and how many counter-examples you needed to verify or falsify claims. At this point I was getting pretty confused and unclear about the examples being used in lectures due to the wordings and adjustment to the use of python (having never programmed before). I still did not know what boolean functions were until I Googled about them. However, after attending the tutorial session and writing the first quiz, everything became a lot clearer and I am fortunately somewhat more comfortable with the material again. Thank you Madina!