Just finished the last 251 Homework!

(hopefully)

Sorry for the lack of posting...

But, this is the last week before finals, and I have two huge homework assignments due tomorrow night at midnight. Always fun, I know. Thankfully, I have finished one of them-the Virtual Machine of C0 (which is a safe subset of C). The Virtual Machine essentially takes the bytecode of a C0 program and interprets it, and then outputs the result. It took a while, but it's finally done!

The other one is the last 251 homework assignment ever! (assuming I pass the course) This one's on ZFCs and logic systems and Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. I need to prove things about the provability of other things. It's inception proofs.

Last day before Carnival!

And I am so excited! The booths are looking bigger and better than ever, and everyone on campus just seems to be happy and stoked for four days of non-stop fun. Most people were done with work yesterday, so the majority of campus may or may not be intoxicated right now, I don't know. However, all of us 251 freshman have a midterm from 6:30 to 9:30 tonight, so we will all be in hyperventilate/panic mode until then.

But after 9:30, Carnival officially starts.

I. CAN'T. WAIT. 

A friend of mine is studying 251 on Gates 6 Balcony...

And looking pretty baller doing it. That's how we do it as CS kids at CMU. 

Pittsburgh Weather

Yes, an entire post dedicated to the weather in the city of Pittsburgh. Simply put, the weather in Pittsburgh can transform from blizzarding to bright and sunny in the span of 20 minutes. Think I'm kidding? It happened three times in one day. It was the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. The weather in Pittsburgh is unpredictable and bipolar, and you can never plan for it.

However, today, Pittsburgh was kind enough to give me my favorite weather-cold and sunny, with no clouds in the sky. Of course, I'll be spending today on Gates 8, attempting to finish 251 homework.

Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science

More commonly known as 251. The dreaded freshman-spring-semester-discrete-math-class. The class that chews kids up and spits them out. And requires them to re-take the class if they get less than a C-which isn't a 70%, closer to a 58%. That's right, the lower boundary for a C is a 58%. Twelve percent lower than normal. If that doesn't scare you, then I tip my hat to you.

Why is 251 so difficult? It's a combination of the concepts, the homework and the exams. So currently, we're learning about Definite Finite Automata (which are actually really cool-very logical) and Counting and Diagonalization. Those concepts are difficult, but it's the applications of those-that we see in the homework-that make them ridiculously difficult. The homework consists of 6 questions, most questions that have multiple parts to them, and must be typed in LaTex-which is a software used to make proofs elegant. Much, much better than Microsoft Equation Editor.

While six questions may not seem like much, there has yet to be a week that I have not pulled an all-nighter to finish this homework assignment on time, or a day late (since we have 5 late days that we can allocate, using at most 3 per assignment). Understanding the question is difficult. But it's when you finally understand the question that you realize how difficult the question really is. Yesterday, for example, I had to prove that there was no sequence of length 3 that consisted of odd numbers separated by two that consisted solely of prime numbers. First, this proof was a contradiction proof, which means I assumed the opposite and proved that to be false. Second, this proof had 12 subcases. TWELVE. And the kicker? That wasn't even what the question was asking for. This just happened to be a sub-proof that I needed to answer the question "rigorously".

Now, of course, I would be lying if I said I hated the class. Yes, it's a really hard class. Yes, I keep bombing the exams and am dangerously close to failing. But the concepts are interesting and I'm learning more about math than I ever did in high school.

And now, back to studying for the weekly quizzes that we have in this class.