I was actually hoping for the chance to draw an FSA. I just find state diagrams to be a very simple way to understand the automata. It was definitely what helped me most for the assignment question.
Overall, I believe I preferred this part of the course. I see regular expressions and FSAs almost more like puzzles, and I think for future iterations of the course it might spread out better if it were possible to lead with the concept of one at the beginning.
Regular expressions have been conveniently overlapping with CSC207. I wish there were more overlap for the fact that it just makes the relevance of everything we’re doing seem more readily apparent. The attention to induction in the beginning makes sense in that it’s the tool we use for most of the course, but I think more co-ordination between the courses in the program would make for a more cohesive experience overall.
I’ve definitely had better days. My kitten got into the peanut butter someone left out, which is bad in and of itself, but I’m quite allergic, and it was tracked into my room. I’ve had worse reactions, but I feel like I’ve been through the ringer.
Instead of looking at breaking the binary tree down into smaller trees of the same properties, I looked at the relationship between siblings. Every node aside from the root has exactly one sibling. Because of this we can assert that there are an even number of nodes with siblings. The even number of nodes plus the root which has no sibling results in a tree with an odd number of nodes for every full binary tree.
Also, Mars food is delicious.
For the longest time, staring at the second question on the problem set, all I could think of was that n(n-1)/2 is the way to sum a series of numbers. I decided to take a break and ask my cat, Schroeder what he thought of it. Schroeder’s area of expertise seems more geared to making me forget about work altogether however.
I came back to the problem this morning and thought about the pairs. The order didn’t matter, and that sounds a lot like n choose 2. It’s more or less given that n choose 2 is the number of pairs possible and from there I was able to muddle through the rest of it, proving the (n+1)th case.
Two things surprised me. First, I actually did work before nine in the morning. I suppose a sidenote to that would be correctly and not out of desperation, but second, that I had retained and am still using bits of Data Management, “the useless highschool math course”.
