It has been a very stressful and busy midterm period. Although it's still not quite over yet for me, I am going to take some time and try to catch up on my slogging.
As I've mentioned before, I missed Week 5's lectures, and I am still having trouble understanding how to deal with closed form expressions. I had no trouble with Problem Set 3, but the notes on developing a closed form expression for the Fibonacci function haven't exactly 'clicked' for me. Perhaps the midterm stress is the cause, but I do have to admit that I haven't really sat down and investigated it thoroughly.
We looked at the complexity of merge-sort and the Mast Theorem last week. I really need to print out the slides and write on them instead. There were many slides of just text last week, and I tried to write them all down. In the end, I had "see slides online" written after trying to copy everything down, and I didn't get to hear anything Prof. Heap said as I was too busy writing. It's probably better that I print the notes, read them before lecture, and then just follow along the lecture. It's so simple, yet I feel that I need to continue writing up my notes since that is how all my notes for this class have been so far. Anyway, we proved that the time complexity of merge-sort was nlogn. We actually took the code and came up with a time complexity of which we proved by building on several smaller proofs. Or.. I think that's what we did. To be honest, I am somewhat lost at the moment in the course. As things die down, I think I will be able to make sense of everything again. Hopefully.
Well, besides catching up on the course, there's also another problem set and assignment due next Monday. I've looked at the problem set, and it should be somewhat similar to what we did in Wednesday's lecture. I'm having a bit of trouble wording what I want to say though. In fact, throughout this course, I seem to have some problems with the way I present anything. I'm going to have to work on that. The assignment.. won't be too bad, I hope.
Labels: Problem Sets, Week Five, Week Six