End of Week Six

So this week we've been looking at the complexity of merge sort and the master theorem. It seems slightly more difficult than what we've been doing previously but still manageable.

We got test 1 back today and now that I see how horrible some of what I wrote was I'm surprised I did as well as I did. I still think the last question was unclear. But I didn't lose too much on it, so whatevs. An example explaining it would've been nice but I guess that would've given away the base case and made it too easy.

A2 is out and looks horrendous. Especially that tree question which despite the fact that it was on A1 is still harder than the rest of A2 in my humble opinion. I have no idea how I'm supposed to do a good job on the assignment when I have a test/midterm in every other class and multiple problem sets and assignments all crammed into the next two weeks.

On the bright side, I really like the problem sets for this course. I find during lecture sometimes I don't understand things, but I learn it by doing the problem set which happens to be incredibly useful. They're easy enough that they're not intimidating and they reinforce the lecture material.

For example, last week I thought finding a closed form for a recurrence was impossible and I didn't understand what we did in lecture at all, but having the problem set forced me to learn it on my own (and made me wonder why I even bother buying course textbooks when wikipedia explains all).

Now to spend my entire weekend, studying for tests and working on assignments...