Assigment 1 Office Hour

So as I said, I went to professor Heap's office hour for the assignment.

There were five or six people waiting in the line. I was hoping they were all coming for this assignment because this way I could hear more about the assignment. ^_^

So when it was my turn, I talked to professor Heap about my question. He thought for a few second and told me my problem was that if I did it in my way then I was not proving what supposed to be proved in the question. I was proving the other way around. I was confused at first, because I thought my logic was correct, but after professor Heap explained to me once and once again, I suddenly realized where did I go wrong. It was to prove "any binary string that begins and ends with the same bit has an even number of occurrences of substrings from {01; 10}" but what I did was to make a provement for "any binary string that  has an even number of occurrences of substrings from {01; 10} begins and ends with the same bit." My induction hypothesis made my conclusion go to the other way around and this was why I felt my induction step was wierd but could not tell how.

After I solved my question, I stayed in professor Heap's office and listened to other students' comments or questions. I liked this atmosphere. It made me feel like I had a wide range of knowledge, like our professor, ^_^ and I felt confident to talk in a group. I also liked to learn with people and listen to their questions becasue everyone may have different idea and thoughts and we can always make a supplement to each other. It helps everyone to progress on study.

Assignment 1

The first assignment is about Induction.

We learnt Simple Induction and Complete Induction in the first two weeks. I thought this assignment aimed to let us practise how to use induction to prove things.

I started to prepare for this assignment today, read relevant contents on the textbook and did a summary of the course notes. Then I thought I was ready enough for this assignment. I read the assignemnt sheet and found it was not so hard although there were lots of things needed to be considered, for example, Simple and Complete, which was better to use for each question?  What was the base case if I used Simple Induction and what was the case that cannot be included in the general case if I used Complete Induction?

As what I always did, my plan was to first write up the answers and then discuss with professor Heap. When I was writing the assignment, I found my approach to do question four was a little bit wierd. I didn't know where did I do wrong but I had the feeling that I missed something important in my induction. So I was going to bring my questing to the office hour and hope I could get some feedback.