Studying for Tutorial 1

This came up on the Wednesday night before our first tutorial quiz (I’m in the Thursday night section). I was mildly worried about it although (for me anyway) it wound up being much easier than I anticipated. I usually find that if I overworry, I overprepare, and that makes me do better, though, so I’m not so unhappy about overworrying because everything goes better than expected. This is the one benefit to being a giant ball of nerves.

Anyway, because I was such a ball of nerves I got a friend to quiz me with induction proofs that he’d yoinked off the internet so that I hadn’t seen them before. The proofs were of varying difficulty. One of them was the standard sum-type sort: 

which is easy enough once you get the trick of splitting the summation into terms that can be induction-hypothesised (from base case to n) and extra terms (the n+1th term). Then it’s straightforward algebra to combine the two into something that looks like the induction hypothesis but with a quick change of variable n -> n+1.

The other was one that looked like:

which we saw later in I think the third week or so, and here you’re supposed to use the fact that the relation LessThan is transitive (so for A < B, and B < C, you know certainly that A < C) and a term-by-term comparison to show the B < C part. Then you’re essentially done. 

Anyway, the rest is less a discussion about the proofs themselves and more about my ridiculous anxiety issues, which I really wish would just go away!

That is not an inventive title!

About me: I'm a 2nd year Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics student. I'm interested in AI and computational linguistics, and admit to mostly taking this course because it's a milestone on the prerequisite path to CSCs 384 and 485, but that doesn't mean I don't find it interesting in and of itself!

I like art and museums. When I'm not in class, I work at a Starbucks as a coffee-serving robot.