More Music to Work To.

I need to show my devotion to the beverage that has gotten me this far.

I Did The Thing

I won't be coy. I am more than happy with the content of the first mid-term. There seemed to me to be no requirement for any transformational laws, or even basic algebra (that will be the end of me in this course, guaranteed).

The questions on the test seemed pretty straight forward though and didn't appear too tricky, although I will admit that I tripped over myself with negations a couple times ("Is 'not any' the same as none, or 'all-not'? Is 'all-not' even a thing? Pretty sure...").
Maybe I also negated "m x n = q" incorrectly.
The fact of the matter is that things seemed straight forward enough to not warrant need of an aid-sheet. Aid sheets are not comforting. All it really means when a prof allows an aid sheet is:
"GO ON. WRITE ANYTHING YOU WANT ON THIS PAPER. NOTHING YOU WRITE CAN HELP YOU NOW."

Either way though, I didn't use an aid sheet...
Because I didn't have an aid sheet...
Because I totally didn't realise that the term test was today.
I thought that the test was on Friday, so I got to be the rube that walked into MP203 at noon thinking, "Hey, where is everybody?"
I checked the course website...and I started running.
I did not study...
I prepared no aid sheet...
I was 12 minutes late...

If I manage to pass this test, anybody who doesn't has no excuse.
Except if their dog just died...
Or they have a terminal illness...

"Assignments make an ass out of gnments and I"

It's rather obvious that I neglected this Slog for a couple weeks, in no small part due to the presence of assignment 1.

To be fair, I find most of the difficulties in logic assignments are the interpretation of the questions.
Am I logic-ing in the way that they want me to?
If I try hard enough, can I make a true implication using nothing but empty sets?
If I slap together enough conjunctions and quantifiers, I'm pretty sure I can pretend I made a uniqueness quantifier.
I'm going to state a non-existence and then predicate a relationship between something and this nothingness no represent a lack of relationship between two things. Yes, that is reasonable.
How do you even catheterize an acronym anyway? It sounds uncomfortable for the both of us.

At very least, I'm seeing some familiar faces from my brief time in PHL245. DeMorgan's law was familiar, although it was taught a lot later in the course, and we had to prove it's logical legitimacy before we were allowed to use it for derivations. It seemed like a pretty big, difficult thing at the time, so much so that I had absolutely no idea how it worked. Now I'm familiar with using it, but I can't help but feel like I only got comfortable with a lot of the transformational rules and what-not because they were mentioned to us with the hum-drum, side-glace of attention. Maybe because in this context, negation seems a lot more like an algebraic property and less like a meaningful proposition the way it feels like in Philosophy sometimes.

Either way, we start proofs soon, and true to this SLOG's theme, I have no idea what's going on. Really. I haven't done math in AGES. This is gonna be a disaster.

My Spoken Dialogic.

The pun in the title didn't work out exactly as well as I'd like, but it's super pretentious, so I'm going to keep it.
Through this week in 165 we're learning the basics of logic in CS. I'm a Cog Sci student first and foremost, so I've had to take a logic course in the past, PHL245, Modern Symbolic Logic. I should probably also note that circumstances led me to not finish the course, BUT it's something.

At very least, it's enough to note that some of the symbols and concepts that are being used in each respective logic system is a bit different. The universal (all) and existential (some) quantifiers are the same but this business with sets, and set interaction...this is new to me.

My professor for Minds and Machines (PHL342) conjured up logic that looks much like that seen in 165. Brian Cantwell Smith did in fact have his origins in information and computer science, so this probably makes a lot of sense. Symbols for implication and negation, for example, differ slightly in the symbolic logic that I had encountered before, but all of the underlying ideas and structures are more or less the same.
...because they'd have to be.
...It's logic.
...That's the point.
Going between the two seems more like speaking two dialects of the same language. The dialectical difference is rather small, and is less like the spoken languages of two nations separated by a vast desert, and more like the vernacular of two towns on opposite sides of a river. What my issue is right now is just picking up on the new lingo of the town that I'm in now. All the concepts seem really straightforward to me, but there's a bit of a weakness when it comes to the symbols. A vital weakness that's just waiting for a test or evaluation to come along and target it specifically.

...I should probably do something about that,

" Real " Python Design Recipie

> Get drunk.
> Write code.
> Sober up.
> Drink entire pot of coffee.
> Debug.
> Realise code is fundamentally flawed.
> ???
> Compile and error.

This is what used to be my SLOG for CSC148 that I took last year. I figure, why make a new one when I can recycle?

This is now my SLOG for CSC165. Those in 148 can probably scroll down and read my unproductive ramblings about the 148 content. I can't possibly imagine why you'd want to do that though.

Sorting Matters.

    Sorting seems to be a favourite I've seen when demonstrating the differences in the run-times of algorithms, my guess is because there are so many different ways that you can do it, and what's more so many different behaviours that each algorithm can have. We saw the most evident of these differences on the larger scale tests in the penultimate lab, but it's always entertaining for me to see the drastically different results that the means with which one handles data can have on the data management efficiency. 

    It happens to be of particular interest to me in Cognitive Science because it can show that the particular way that you take in and manage information, has a significant effect of how quickly you can use it, and in what contexts. With things such as working memory that are so tied to problem-solving abilities and general intelligence, information-handling efficiency is particularly important because of how limited working memory is both in capacity and in the amount of time information can be held in it. Showing a distinct difference in sorting algorithm run-times suggests that even in our own working memory, the way that we encode and manipulate information in our own brains might be a factor in how well we are able to solve problems and efficiently carry out tasks. It's really a fascinating thing.