Monday, 1 October 2012

Week 4 Begins

A quarter of the way through the semester ALREADY. It always goes so fast.

Last week I got my first assignment for this course done. I didn't have a lot of difficulty with it.

I was impressed with myself with the way I solved question 4. Instead of combining the two related claims about binary strings, I proved only the claim about strings beginning and ending with the same bit. I accomplished this through my induction step. I went to the next string by inserting an arbitrary bit in the center (or Ceil(n/2)), thus preserving the same bit at each end. I thought this was clever.

I can see how one would prove this using the combined claim, but I wanted to see if my way would work and it did!

My plans for this week are to start the tutorial #2 problems. I have looked them over, I just haven't sat down to work them out. This is assuming my CSC209 assignment won't hog all my time. At least I got the assignment for this course finished so I'm not rushing on that.

On a side note, I wish my door didn't let in so much noise so I could still be asleep.

So long.

4 comments:

  1. It is clever, and it uses Complete Induction (which is allowed for this question).

    I had originally thought of the problem for Mathematical Induction, where the hint is most appropriate.

    By the way, the insert idea will work for n>=2, but the claim is true for n=1 also.

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    1. I proved separately n=1 and n=2 as base cases.

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  2. One other thing: be careful that you end up with strictly shorter binary strings when you use the induction hypothesis.

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    1. I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. I would think it would be implied, by adding a bit, that the previous string was strictly shorter.

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