A1 accomplished!

11:59 pm. Somehow it sounds like an omnious foreshadowing that only we, the students, who depend on the minute-hand of the accurate MarkUs clock know about. Having fought an intense battle against that clock last year in CSC165, I am quite pleased to have finished A1 well before its deadline. From what I remember in CSC165, it was not because of procrastination that led my partners and I to race against time, but because we were always unsure of the solutions that we had generated, and thus the urge to change what we have written until the last minute. Having experienced that, I found this first assignment to be much clearer (of course, after leaving myself a good amount of time for discussion and question).

Surprisingly, the inequality question was not as easy as I thought it would be.  When I first looked at the question, I thought of it as just consisting of purely mathematical reasoning that gets from the left side of the equation to the right side. However, getting there is not as simple as 1 + 1. I had to go back to the 165 Big-O section to review the techniques to tackle these inequalities. But even then, there was no elegant way that lets me solve the problem without assuming in some part of the proof that n >= a certain natural number. The following lecture that talked about inequalites cleared my doubt.

Another question that yielded a different type of uncertainty was question 4. I was pretty sure that I was on the right track after discussing with my friends and digging into the hint provided in 4) about using a stronger claim to prove the desired claim. However, the proof just looked longer than it should be because of the large number of cases that it needed to be divided into. Thanks to the professor's office hours and my friend who continued waiting in-line when I had to go to another class, I was assured that sometimes, a proof needs to be a bit longer in order to be convincing.