Working with Predicates

Note: This post covers Week 3.

This week we practiced some more operations with predicates, specifically conjunctions

and disjunctions. I took a statistics course previously so it was a bit confusing at first as I tried to differentiate between these operations and the union and intersect operations in sets.We then started doing operations with multiple predicates, which because increasingly difficult to show on a Venn diagram, so truth tables were introduced to simplify that matter.

I enjoyed the tutorial this week because it was good to have a chance to practice and apply everything we learned in the long lecture. The problem set was fairly challenging and it was a good opportunity to make sure I understood how to use predicates. Overall, this was a pretty easy, still introductory week.

First Post!

Note: This post covers Week 1 & 2.

My name is Theo and I'm a freshman taking CSC165 with Prof. Zhang. I'll be posting every week about my experience with the class: things I learned/enjoyed, topics that were interesting, particular difficulties with the material, etc. Feel free to comment on my posts to ask questions or provide your own reflections on the class. Since this is my first post I'll be discussing the first two weeks of class.

The first class was an introduction to mathematical logic. It was interesting experiencing my first three-hour lecture (fortunately we have break every now and then). Prof. Zhang started a discussion on how to achieve the right balance between precision (ie: machine language) and ambiguity (ie: human languages). He then introduced mathematical quantifiers, which allowed us to segway to more complex topics in the second class such as negation, predicates and equivalence. It was a bit confusing at first but we went through an exhaustive set of examples and that made the material easier to understand. We also had our first lab this Thursday which was a good way to cement the concepts.

Looking forward to next class!