The weeks of catch up to make up my three week schedule deficit; the stresses of getting through the M381 TMA mentioned previously; the bashing my head against the wall to understand what the hell primitive recursion was; the all-nighter on Monday night to finish the M337 TMA*; not to mention the difficulty in fitting this around work (sure everyone does this, but it doesn't make it any easier)... it was worth it!
Distinction, in both cases! Woohoo.
This is a big deal to me. Bigger than in the previous courses, when to be honest, the first TMAs were usually a walk in the park. This time around, that certainly was not the case. I don't have a problem with hard assignments of course, but I like getting easy marks as much as the next guy!
As you may recall, I didn't think I had done so well in M381, but as it turned out, my result pipped the ninety mark. Unsurprisingly, my URM-related answers were awash with comments, but the bits around them on what the functions actually represent were okay. Overall, a great confidence boost for starters on Level 3.
My result in M337 was a bit lower, and only just got past the requisite 85 for distinction, but pass it did. There was no section where I did especially worse than others; my lost marks were spread almost uniformly throughout. It was the final question, on differentiation, partial derivatives and conformal functions which helped keep my mark up. Unexpected, considering I'd not got to conformality yet. I had already resigned myself to a very late night, so I didn't quite search just for the info needed. What I did was 'read' the final half of the unit rather than work through it. A big chunk, fortunately, was just the complex equivalent of the differentiation rules, composition et cetera.
I've been doing daily short translations recently. They are a section of the transcription of these daily press conferences the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yukio Edano has been holding after the earthquake disaster and the trouble at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. It's a nice regular job, but it is hard for me because of the 'talky' style.
Anyway, the press conferences have been cancelled this weekend. So for once, I am actually completely free! The good maths mood the TMA results have put me in should hopefully inspire me to get a lot of that done today and tomorrow. I'm still in the procrastination phase, but I'll get started soon. With some luck, I'll complete the catch-up process, as I'm still not quite there on either course. It should be do-able, but even if it's not, I'm nowhere near how far behind I was a month ago. I just need to keep it that way.
* It's been a bad week all in all for getting enough sleep. So I started with an all-nighter for work on Sunday night, getting to bed at 6am. This was followed by the TMA-related one, finishing at 7am. And then on Thursday night, I spent until 5am reading through Kim's dissertation, which I'd promised I would do on Thursday, but put off and put off because of work (which I didn't particularly want to do).
Saturday 9 April 2011
Sunday 3 April 2011
Always read the not-necessariy-small print
Okay, so I didn't catch up quite as easily as I had hoped I would.
Hence no posting for such a long time.
I spent most of the last week's run up to the deadline for the M381 TMA bemoaning the fact that it's deadline, 31st March, was a week before the fourth book, ML2 was due to be completed.
That's not fair, that's not fair! I was like a broken record. But soldier on I did, and excluding the Wednesday prior, when I spent the day in a narcoleptic haze of uncontrollable sleeping, I spent days solid on ML2 with the hopes of finishing it on Saturday and then starting on the TMA, giving me Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to get through it, and as I do it by hand, write it up.
I didn't finish by Saturday. In fact, I didn't finish Sunday either. That book is hard work! Specifically, the first twenty pages are hard work, which were on primitive recursiveness. So I opted to work until midday on Monday, then do as much of the TMA as I could, and finish the last few questions using the good ole, "find the relevant bit in the unstudied textbook at the same time as doing the TMA question" technique. This is something I swore I'd not do this year.
Glancing at the cover of the assessment booklet Monday lunchtime though, what did I spy?
Contents Cut-off date
TMA M381 01 31 March 2011
(Units 1 and 2 of NT, and Unit 1 of ML)
Bugger! I could have been working on the TMA since the previous Wednesday, as that bloody textbook wasn't even assessed yet!
Fortunately, with the exceptions of Question 4 (where you have three statements which you must prove if true, or find a counterexample otherwise), and the final question (on concatenating two URM* programs for functions f and g to make one that performs function h, by primitive recursion from the other two), it wasn't too hard. But those two took a lot of work. I did the rest and left them to finish on Tuesday.
Unfortunately, I had things to do that day, including sitting around doing nothing for the first half of the day, and then, when I started, a lot of time was wasted fiddling with the concatenation 'recipe' from the textbook to make sure I got it right... I don't think I did.
Then for some crazy reason I waited until 8pm before starting on Question 4.
I wont go into details, but I wasted the first 2-3 hours trying to prove something that was false. A bit more trial and error when all hope seemed lost and I found a relatively simple counterexample! What's wrong with me!? The other two weren't quite so bad, at least. I knew I'd have trouble with that question, as almost all the proving stuff examples and problems in the textbook had me checking the back of the book. Very annoying.
I'm dreading getting it back, as I doubt those two questions were right, and I should probably account for dropped points here and there, elsewhere too. On the plus side, my tutor told us at the tutorial that he would mark questions on URM programs based on whether they work rather than how efficient they are. Hopefully that stretches to completely unnecessary instructions that can never be executed. I found a random copy instruction in the middle of a program for another question when writing it all up on Wednesday morning before the mad dash to the post office. I know how it got there, but I couldn't get it to work by removing it. Very weird. Well, I won't miss URM programs when they're done and dusted, though I appreciate that they taught me something about computability. And I really liked the proof of the fact that the set of URM programs is countably infinite...as was given in the textbook I didn't need to have studied!
It was a nice surprise to suddenly get onto Cantor and infinite sets though. That is very cool stuff!
I'm now mere days from the deadline for M337. I haven't wasted time studying a textbook that's not assessed for another two months this time, but the delay caused by doing that last week has still left me trying to churn out a TMA in just two days. So why am I wasting my time posting? Actually, because I can't get any work done on it today anyway, as I have a job due in, which at this rate will keep me busy until 4am. I did about half of the TMA last night and this morning at least, but I'm also only half the way through the last unit assessed and will have to hunt for the relevant bits that I've not yet studied for the last question. I hate doing that...
The moral of the story therefore is to always read the not-necessarily-small print!
Right, back to work!
*For those that don't know, Unlimited Register Machines are theoretical 'computers' that use just four simple instructions to manipulate numbers stored in their registers, and thereby perform functions on the natural numbers: 'Successor' S(x) adds 1 to the number in register x; 'Zero' Z(x) replaces the number in register x with a 0; 'Jump' J(x,y,q) jumps to instruction q if the numbers in registers x and y are the same; and 'Copy' C(x,y) copies the number in register x to register y.
Hence no posting for such a long time.
I spent most of the last week's run up to the deadline for the M381 TMA bemoaning the fact that it's deadline, 31st March, was a week before the fourth book, ML2 was due to be completed.
That's not fair, that's not fair! I was like a broken record. But soldier on I did, and excluding the Wednesday prior, when I spent the day in a narcoleptic haze of uncontrollable sleeping, I spent days solid on ML2 with the hopes of finishing it on Saturday and then starting on the TMA, giving me Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to get through it, and as I do it by hand, write it up.
I didn't finish by Saturday. In fact, I didn't finish Sunday either. That book is hard work! Specifically, the first twenty pages are hard work, which were on primitive recursiveness. So I opted to work until midday on Monday, then do as much of the TMA as I could, and finish the last few questions using the good ole, "find the relevant bit in the unstudied textbook at the same time as doing the TMA question" technique. This is something I swore I'd not do this year.
Glancing at the cover of the assessment booklet Monday lunchtime though, what did I spy?
Contents Cut-off date
TMA M381 01 31 March 2011
(Units 1 and 2 of NT, and Unit 1 of ML)
Bugger! I could have been working on the TMA since the previous Wednesday, as that bloody textbook wasn't even assessed yet!
Fortunately, with the exceptions of Question 4 (where you have three statements which you must prove if true, or find a counterexample otherwise), and the final question (on concatenating two URM* programs for functions f and g to make one that performs function h, by primitive recursion from the other two), it wasn't too hard. But those two took a lot of work. I did the rest and left them to finish on Tuesday.
Unfortunately, I had things to do that day, including sitting around doing nothing for the first half of the day, and then, when I started, a lot of time was wasted fiddling with the concatenation 'recipe' from the textbook to make sure I got it right... I don't think I did.
Then for some crazy reason I waited until 8pm before starting on Question 4.
I wont go into details, but I wasted the first 2-3 hours trying to prove something that was false. A bit more trial and error when all hope seemed lost and I found a relatively simple counterexample! What's wrong with me!? The other two weren't quite so bad, at least. I knew I'd have trouble with that question, as almost all the proving stuff examples and problems in the textbook had me checking the back of the book. Very annoying.
I'm dreading getting it back, as I doubt those two questions were right, and I should probably account for dropped points here and there, elsewhere too. On the plus side, my tutor told us at the tutorial that he would mark questions on URM programs based on whether they work rather than how efficient they are. Hopefully that stretches to completely unnecessary instructions that can never be executed. I found a random copy instruction in the middle of a program for another question when writing it all up on Wednesday morning before the mad dash to the post office. I know how it got there, but I couldn't get it to work by removing it. Very weird. Well, I won't miss URM programs when they're done and dusted, though I appreciate that they taught me something about computability. And I really liked the proof of the fact that the set of URM programs is countably infinite...as was given in the textbook I didn't need to have studied!
It was a nice surprise to suddenly get onto Cantor and infinite sets though. That is very cool stuff!
I'm now mere days from the deadline for M337. I haven't wasted time studying a textbook that's not assessed for another two months this time, but the delay caused by doing that last week has still left me trying to churn out a TMA in just two days. So why am I wasting my time posting? Actually, because I can't get any work done on it today anyway, as I have a job due in, which at this rate will keep me busy until 4am. I did about half of the TMA last night and this morning at least, but I'm also only half the way through the last unit assessed and will have to hunt for the relevant bits that I've not yet studied for the last question. I hate doing that...
The moral of the story therefore is to always read the not-necessarily-small print!
Right, back to work!
*For those that don't know, Unlimited Register Machines are theoretical 'computers' that use just four simple instructions to manipulate numbers stored in their registers, and thereby perform functions on the natural numbers: 'Successor' S(x) adds 1 to the number in register x; 'Zero' Z(x) replaces the number in register x with a 0; 'Jump' J(x,y,q) jumps to instruction q if the numbers in registers x and y are the same; and 'Copy' C(x,y) copies the number in register x to register y.
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