Week 5-6: Closed Form, Merge Sort

Just got my test back on Friday morning and it was definitely lower than what I had expected. But the class average was actually pretty solid, in the low 70s range? I was really satisfied with my assignment and thought I'd go in to the term test doing alright. Looks like I'll be needing to do more induction problems and solve quickly within a time limit. The subset question sort of threw me off. It was similar to the question we had in class of 2^n subsets, but to me, I thought this one required much more thinking. The base case was rather easy to develop and show how if n was equal to 2, the subset {1,2} would omit either one of the elements or both. However, in the induction step, it didn't come to mind of using partition and the constraint of n+1>2. Luckily I had some partial marks for the base case and the general structure. Although I still lost marks on the the other 2 test questions, I found them pretty fair.

Starting into Week 5 and 6 with closed form problems and merge sort, I kind of struggled with problem set 4. In the unwinding progress, I ended up with 3^n + 3^n-1 + 3. I had problems figuring out what the constant would be because in my case, it always varied. Will more problems be posted on unwinding? I'd like a lot more practice in preparation for the 2nd midterm. Exploring mergeSort was what we focused the past week and the logic again seemed pretty straight forward. However, I'd probably need to enhance my algebra skills to prepare for more upcoming divide and conquer concepts.

Time to start writing on paper for A2! The 4th question from A1 still remains unsolved, since the drawings of the trees are just getting more and more messy..will there be any hints on this problem?

Week 3-4 Fibonacci and RecBinSearch

It's been almost 2 weeks since I've written on this page with all the assignments and projects going on in other classes and in CSC 207. I just checked the mark for assignment 1 with my partner and we're both very satisfied with the mark. It really does reflect the effort we've put in and much thanks to the TA's at the TA centre and Danny for clarifying several parts of the proof structures. Hopefully I continue to remain confident and study hard for the upcoming test this Friday. There are indeed a few worries on my mind right now, especially the material from week 4. On the surface, the concepts of Fibonacci numbers aren't hard to grasp. We've explored it before in CSC 165. But, the unwinging zpf problem that we did together in class is a question I don't understand completely at the moment. I'm not exactly sure how the coefficients are calculated in each of the rows of T(n). Do we have to guess the general equation of the function for the unwind zpf(n) as well as the RecBinSearch question?