Week 4

This week, we're back to the old stuff from last year, but more indepth. Danny taught us about how we can prove recursive functions using induction. This part isn't too difficult to understand because we practiced recursion a lot in 148 last year. I believe most of us understand how it works. Then, there's time complexity and unwinding. Coming up with a function that calculates the time complexity of a recursive function wasn't too hard after learning how to unwind. All it takes to learn how to unwind are just basic math concepts.

-Assignment 1-
Assignment 1... I'd say it's more difficult than last year. I invited my friend over one day to discuss it. After looking through it, we just sat there staring into empty space. I knew how to do question 1 because I've done something very similar many times in high school. The other three were just horrible. Question 2 took me an hour to start off... I had no clue of how to do question 3. I couldn't even understand what question 4 was talking about. So, we decided to go on discussion board. Thank god! Question 4 is postponed to the next assignment. We've also found some hints that Danny and other classmates gave us. However, we still had little idea of how to solve the questions. Therefore, we went to the computer science help center. It was extremely helpful. The TAs tries hard and they don't just tell you the answer, which is great. I will only end up in bad condition for tests and exams if they just tell me the answer. I think understanding the material is more important than getting 100% without knowing what's going on. For question 2, the TAs told me different ways to design the technique. Afterwards, I just proved it by using induction. For question 3, I just had them explaining to me what Danny's hint meant. Then, I immediately knew how to do it. I am expecting a decent grade for this assignment. =D