The Last Entry...

Well, there goes another semester...

My overall experience in 236 was a great one. I've learned so much from Danny over the past two semesters (165 + 236) that I don't know what I'm going to do without him as my prof next year. Knowing me I'll probably still go to his office hours for help in upper-year theory courses, regardless if he's my teacher or not... Haha...

All the assignments and problem-sets went well. All of the tests were fair. Now all that's left is the final exam.

It's gonna be weird not writing in this slog anymore. I don't know if it's a good or bad weird either... I mean, sometimes it's good to let go of your thoughts and frusterations by writing in this thing. Other times you have nothing to say, and you struggle for words... It just depends on the day I guess...

I'm looking forward to the break, and to understanding and learning about the next level of computer science theory... So I guess that's it!

12th Entry

Is it just me or can converting a DFSA to an NFSA get really complicated really fast? I've been in Bahen for the past couple of hours now, somewhat struggling to turn DFSAs into NFSAs. And no, not for fun... but to prepare for tomorrow's midterm haha.

If the DFSA is somewhat complicated to begin with, then trying to convert it into a NFSA is just... crazy. I mean it's so easy to get thrown off by just removing ONE state, let alone all of them. I'm slowly getting the hang of it by trying to make my DFSA as simple compact as possible, which makes it easier to follow when removing states and what not. Otherwise it's really really easy to make a small error that will throw off the entire machine. All those inner-loop Kleene Star things... Ugh. Oh well, at least I'm making some progress.

11th Entry

We've been learning all about context-free grammars for the past couple of weeks and it's pretty interesting stuff. At least to me anyway. I don't find this topic difficult to understand at all, and like I said before, I think it's actually quite enjoyable (well maybe not enjoyable, but you know what I mean)...

I've been experimenting with trying to make different DFSA/NFSA machines for different languages to practice for the upcoming test, and so far so good. Also last week A3 was due, which my partner and I managed to finish and hand in on time. I think it went pretty well. The only thing that I have to reflect on is loop invariants, and proving that RE's can/can-not represent a particular language. I think that's probably the hardest part of this entire topic.

Other then that, the semester is winding down and we're just about entering the exam period. It's been a heavy work-load this semester but all in all I think I pulled through and did well. The test this Friday is all about regex, languages, context-free grammars and all that other fun stuff.

I'm going to begin studying tomorrow... If I come across anything that really confuses me, or that I just find interesting, I'll be sure to post in my SLOG about it... That's it for now!