Take Two

The main topic we covered this week was that of Conjunctions and Disjunctions; what they are and their negations.
I'm sure that I was not the only one in class who saw these as pretty much the math versions of  'AND' and 'OR' logic gates. The concept was simple enough to grasp but what I still have a problem in is translating from English to symbols. Like one of the questions in our preparation for this week's tutorial is "No course is a prerequisite for itself."(1.d.) While doing the earlier parts of the same question it was easy enough to have one x and one y and either existentially or universally quantify them. This part left me stumped because how do I quantify two courses when I am only talking about only one course? I had similar problems with the rest of the parts of question 1.

Thankfully, all was sorted out during tutorial when I found out that we can in fact, use multiple variables or even the same ones.
So, looking back at what we've done this week, it's hard for me to find something that I found exceptionally difficult. I like to think that I'm a very logical person in general  => math logic comes easily to me. That is the case most of the time except for when someone in my tutorial starts asking questions about how Q only if P sounds more like Q iff P when we say it in English and I am pretty sure that's when my mind went from "Yeah, I got this" to "What?". I saw his point, but I also (soon) saw the problem with the point. Q will happen if P happens, but P is not the ONLY cause for Q. It got us thinking and I'm sure we all benefited from it.

And thus another week went by and the thing that I worried about the most was still this SLOG. 

The Not-So-Bad Beginning

When I first realized that I was going to have to write a BLOG for a COMPUTER SCIENCE course I was, mildly put, surprised. Turns out this CSC course has more Math and English than Python in it(so far).

In the very beginning it was the symbols of the mathematical terms in this class that made me want to turn around and walk back out of the class. But it so happens that the mathematical terms like universal and existential quantifiers, sets, subsets, unions, and intersections, that we have learnt in the past two weeks have been essentially the same as the ones I have learnt in MAT137 in the same span of time.  This made it much easier for my brain to not freeze every time it saw an inverted A or a backward E on the screen. What took longer to grasp was the concept of Quantifier claims translated in English, like "P only if/only when Q" and "Not P unless/if not Q".  Determining the 'P' and the 'Q' in situations like "Don't knock on it unless you have tried it" or "I will go only if you insist", was something that escaped my understanding until I sat back, blocked out everything else, and clearly thought them out. If I just look at them and try to identify the parts, I am more than likely to get it all wrong. But mulling over them, REALLY thinking about what leads to what, and going through all the options in my mind helps me develop a clear train of thought as to what the 'P' and 'Q' of the statement are.

Apart from the overcoming the challenge of making my mind think in the mathematical way, the thing that I was most worried about was this slog itself. The importance of communication is often undermined in technical fields such as Computer Science, but it is necessary  to understand the value of assignments like this one for the sake of communication. While I may worry about my slog turning into a complete disaster, I hope I can do enough with it to help myself and my classmates in the future, and have a little fun on the way too.