week 13 -- test 3, final entry

Today I wrote test 3, and found no problems with it; it seemed fairly straight forward. I thought there might be a pumping lemma question on it, but it was mostly material covered in the last assignment.

I think the exam might be more tricky than anything we've been exposed to so far (just a hunch). I plan on looking over all material covered in assignment, problem sets and lecture. I think my weaknesses lie within the last section (CFGs) and maybe correctness and structural induction.

As this is my last post, I thought I might reflect back upon the course in general. I actually found it to be a little challenging at first. I made some mistakes in the approaches I initially took and did not have good vision for what the proofs should look like. I think I've gone a good distance towards developing a bit of that vision. Rather than getting scared at the thought of writing induction proofs, I enjoy trying to construct them. Of course, I realize this course might be relatively easy compared to other more advanced math/CS courses. But its definitely peaked my interest in the field. I thank Danny and the T.A.s for helping guide me through my initial troubles and showing me different ways to approach a given problem.

week 12 -- exam review, test 3

I've started studying for the exam and also getting ready for test 3. I was surprised to learn that test 3 was going to be only on regular expressions (ch7) and not on context free grammars (ch8). But I guess ch8 will be saved for the exam.

I'm finding languages to be very interesting, especially with context-free grammars being tied in with programming languages. I find that the automata models that are presented offer a good visualization of what strings may be accepted within a specified language. I imagine that this has big implications within computer science, given that much of it deals with parsing certain regular and non regular languages.

For the exam, I plan on looking through past exams and working through those problems. Right now, I feel confident about general induction proofs (ch2), as well as correctness proofs. I need a bit of work with languages, in order to feel confident. I'll probably feel better after having studied for test 3.

After looking at the partial solutions for A3, I'm curious as to how my question 4 will be marked. On the solutions, there are only 5 states; but for my solution I had 10 states. I still think my solution works, but I guess that having fewer states would probably be a better solution. I wonder how it might be marked, and if there will be deductions.