SLOG #7: Week 11

Hey there and welcome back to my final SLOG for CSC148. Last time I talked about how I wasn't going to miss another SLOG, guess I was wrong. Well for this final SLOG, i'll try to put in as much as I can to make up for the missed weeks. So without any further delay...

For my last SLOG the topic is going to be 'Sorting and Efficiency'. Sorting was a topic that was touched on in CSC108, but only three methods were presented to us, as well the relative efficiency with one another were not discussed. In class, as well as in CSC165, we looked at describing the run-times of these sorting algorithms in terms of their worse cases, this case was chosen as the best cases and average cases tell us, as computer scientists nothing about any issues that may arise when testing larger and larger sample sizes.

We describe the run-time with an upper bound function, a run-time that is, after some point, always larger than the run time of the program. This kind of description is called 'big-oh'. All of the various sorting algorithms can be described using this 'big-oh' notation, for example selection sort is O(n²). Quite clearly all other sorting algorithms can be described in this way (my personal favorite is bogosort). The function used is found by looking at the number of times you run through the input of size n, from there the upper bound function is easily derived.

And that concludes the required writing of the SLOG. From this point forward, i'll be talking about my experience in this course and the SLOG writing process. In general I liked this course, it taught me a lot of ideas and ways of thinking in compsci that I hadn't thought of before. The process of writing SLOGs was fun and in many ways rewarding. Although it was a little difficult to get into writing weekly (technically my SLOG wasn't even weekly), I liked reflecting on what we did in class and it was a good exercise in writing (something I really need to get better at). All in all, it was a fun ride, all that's left is the final exam. Thanks for reading!

SLOG #6

Hey again, and welcome back to my SLOG for CSC148. This week's SLOG (which will count for last week's) will be regarding part one of assignment two. I apologize to all my dedicated weekly readers for my late SLOG, but term tests and assignments clouded my mind enough for me to (almost) forget to write this one. Anyways, on to today's topic; assignment two.

We were tasked with constructing classes to represent regexes, regular expressions in python. Looking at it now that we've finished it, it wasn't the hardest thing to code, but we ran into some troubles. It is important to read over the assignment carefully before coding, our group forgot this cardinal rule and proceeded to write methods for string representation and string comparison. We only realized our mistake once we looked at the piazza and found that others had also made the same mistake, and we quickly rewrote our code to fit the requirements of part one.

I, for one, am glad that the deadline for the assignment was pushed back, as it gave us more time to realize our mistake. What I learned from this experience is that I need to read over assignments carefully and to thank the people at UTSC and UTM (although this does mean we have less to do for part two). Also, I should probably stop apologizing like I have for the last two SLOGs and actually put out more SLOGs. Anyways, until next time readers!