Week 2 & 3

    Well to start off, I feel a bit more overwhelmed than I did last week with the course material. I was familiar with the conjunction "and", disjunction "or", and negation since in CSC108 I did exercises about Boolean operators. A short and simple summary of this material includes:

1. In order for "P and Q" to be true, both P and Q must be true. For it to be false, either P, Q or both P and Q must be false. The symbol for "and" is ∧and is similar to another symbol, ∩ (intersection). 

2. In order for "P or Q" to be true, at least one of P or Q must be true. For the statement to be false, both P and Q must be false. The symbol for "or" is which is similar to another symbol, ∪(union). 

3. And lastly, to invert truth value we use the negation symbol, ¬. If P were true, the value of ¬ ¬P would be true.

    I also understand vacuous truth, equivalent and equal sets, tautology, satisfiability, and unsatisfiability, but some other concepts I still have questions about. Mainly, the converse of an implication and symbolic expressions confuse me.

    Firstly, I know what the definition of contrapositive and converse is, but I still fail to grasp why the converse of an implication is not the same as the implication. I feel like the answer is simpler, but my mind gets all jumbled especially when I start mixing causality with logic (which according to the course notes, shouldn't be done).

    Another thing I'm stuck on is the tutorial exercise for this week. I did the exercise by myself at home and I thought I had done it right, but when we took it up in class I had gotten everything completely wrong. It made a  bit more sense when my TA took up the exercise but I wish I had gotten more of a chance to practice and learn from my mistakes before the quiz. Even 5 minutes to look over the exercise would have made me feel a lot more comfortable with the material. I take back what I said last week, that I was excited to learn new symbols. I thought these symbols would be fun! :(

    Speaking of which, the quiz was quite easy I suppose. Even though I got the exercise questions all wrong, I think I answered the quiz question correctly...at least some it anyway. I realized that I'll definitely need to find more resources for me to practice translating English to symbolic expressions and vice versa because I find that the course notes only touch upon a fraction of what we really need to know in order to do well in this course. The notes are too general and I need to find practice sheets of some sort or a textbook to help me learn more in-depth.

    Anyways, I plan on forcing myself to go to the CS Help Aid Center (since when I tried to see my professor, there were quite a few people and not enough time until my next class). Also, I think the assignment due on Oct. 3 should help. Although my group members don't seem to know much more than me, I think talking about it with other people should help.

   

    And oh yes, midterms are coming in less than 2 weeks and I'm pooping my pants, but I plan on prioritizing this course since I'm struggling the most in it. After talking to my friends, I don't seem to be the only one struggling though. I guess we can all suffer together, yay!