week 8

I'm currently getting ready for test 2 and waiting for the solutions for assignment 2.  I feel that I did fairly well on assignment 2.  Question 2 had me slightly confused at moments, as I overcomplicated things.  In the course notes, for the mergesort example, they make the assumption that n is a power of 2 in order to get rid of the floors and ceilings.  I hadn't realized that this assumption was only necessary for that purpose, but had thought (for some strange reason) that is was necessary in order to obtain the closed form, and that it would apply to the assignment question.  As I found out in the TA office hours, this wasn't necessary.  I believe the correct solution only calls for a closed form found through repeated substitution and then reduction with a floor of log7n.  The last question in the assignment, on correctness, was very similiar to what we learned in lecture and in the course notes.  I believe the only difference was that we had to show that m was between b and e, where m = sqrt(b*e)

For the test, I plan on practicing some of the extra problems in the course notes and reviewing the assignment.  Hopefully, there won't be any extra tricky problems in the test that ask for some sort of complicated assumptions.  From what I've seen so far, correctness doesn't look to be too difficult.  I'll review what's in the course notes and lecture notes.