September 26, 2014 - Let me tell you a story.

Let me tell you a story.

There was once a young squirrel by the name of Squirrely Squirrel the Squird.

This is Squirrely

Squirrely Squirrel the Squird holding a nut.

Now, Squirrely loves nuts. Some say that Squirrely is never seen without a nut.

In fact, given P, a set of all pictures, S, a set of all pictures of Squirrely, and N, a set of all pictures with a nut, I can say that for all x in P such that for all y in P, x is in S if and only if y is in N. That is to say, for every single picture in the universe, that picture is a picture of Squirrely if and only if that picture has a nut. In fancy notation (for fancy people), that statement is written as ∀x∈P, ∀y∈P, x∈S ⇔ y∈P

Now, what prevented me from saying "for all x in S, x is in N"? ∀x∈S, x∈N

Or what about "for all x in P, if x is in S, then x is in N"? ∀x∈P, x∈S ⇒ x∈N

They're all equivalent statements... or are they?

Answer, these statements are not equivalent! My original statement claims that every picture of Squirrely has a nut AND every picture of a nut has Squirrely. The latter two statements only imply that Squirrely is always seen with a nut, but they say nothing about nuts being seen with Squirrely.

Yes, if there is a nut in the world, the nut will always be in the clutches of Squirrely.



Which brings us to our current point: logic is hard.


P.S. This is a cool website for symbols, but it keeps making a gray background when I copy and paste: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols

P.P.S. This is a link to a cool programmer who has no idea what he's doing, like me! I mean, we're both struggling to get through this course.
http://beardlessprogrammer.blogspot.ca/

September 19, 2014 - "It was a dark and drowsy morning"

Hello, world!

It appears that the universe is in need of another one of my blogs again.

Fun fact, 1:45 AM is typically not the best time to be blogging.

Anyways, it turns out that MAT137 is very similar to CSC165! I even went as far as to copy and paste the "universal and existential" part of my MAT137 notes into my CSC165 notes. I sometimes feel like I'm studying for two classes at once even though these classes are very different in terms of how things are taught. More specifically, CSC165 is more heavily entrenched in computer science whereas MAT137 relates more to math. But logic is still logic, no matter what language I speak. Yes, I just made math a subset of language. Look, I'm using my feeble knowledge of CSC165 to talk like a logician already!

To posterity: the most important thing about CSC165 is that you should never schedule your blog night to be the night before the due date. For example, tonight (or I guess this morning?) I'm in a hurry to finish this blog and all of my other work I scheduled for Friday just so I can have a day off on Friday for other scheduled activities.

Speaking of CSC165, I have to say that these past two weeks have been interesting. Either that, or my sleep deprivation is taking the best out of my brain's ability to logic. For starters, I learned that Python has a set builder notation to not only save me time when creating detailed lists, but also to bombard my computer with infinite loops in a more sophisticated fashion (have yet to test)!

Then everything dissolved into "What."

I have a new proposition for mankind: The "What" theory. It goes something like this - "If the problem involves logic, then brains are bound to melt." For example, the "any" and "all" functions seemed simple enough, but it's important to read something like "x in s2 for x in s1" as:

Each element given in s1 is also an element in s2. The problem is that I intuitively think that the subset should have been written first to avoid confusion. If I made the Python language, I would have made it more simple, like "s1 subset s2."

Then we have the wonderful Venn diagrams which confused everyone! I think the Venn diagrams were an alright exercise to work out the kinks of the logic process, but the X's and O's were very confusing! We even had a debate in my tutorial over whether or not we should have minimized the usage of X's and O's if the X's and O's were already implied. Wow, even talking about it is starting to confuse me.

I suppose the one problem I have with this course is the lack of practice problems! I don't know what to do in order to improve my grade if I understand the course material but I'm not familiar with the course material! I can only check if my three Python programs passed three tests so many times.

But hey, as long as I stay optimistic, what's the worst that can't happen? Hooray for bad jokes?

And hey, here's another example:
"'If you're rich, then you must have a job in the field of computer science' is a false statement (counter example: Justin Bieber)."

Source:
http://165slogs.blogspot.ca/search?updated-max=2014-10-12T19:38:00-07:00&max-results=7