Well the time for all students everywhere to be bucking down to study... Yeah riiiiight. We all know that we will end up waiting for the last minute before starting to study, pulling all-nighters and ruining our health with junk food and lack of sleep.
I suppose at this point in time, we somewhat know what our mark will be like going into the exam. As for the test we wrote last week (I ranted about it last post), I performed just as well as I had thought considering it was not up to the difficulty I had expected and hoped for. I was also informed that my remark request for term test 1 ended up having no change - I guess getting a perfect 100% in this class is now impossible. Such a shame. All that remains is two more quizzes, the results for assignment 2, this SLOG and the final exam! Time remaining dwindles and now it is crunch time.
Last week's tutorial quiz and problems were based on last week's lecture so it wasn't very easy for me to study for the quiz. Even so, the professor made the concept of DFSAs quite clear in lecture. With the guidance of the TA during tutorial itself, the subsequent quiz was no problem at all. I hope. With this last tutorial, that puts the evening class ahead of the morning class in terms of content and the number of quizzes completed. However I suppose this is better than having to attend classes afterwards to make up (haha!).
A noteworthy question that came up during this previous week was probably the first question of the tutorial problems. As I recall, the goal was to create a finite state machine that will accept strings that conform to a particular set of rules. The interesting tool that was used to do this was the Automation Simulator - it was simply a graphical representation of the machine. Using circles as states and headed-lines to connect the states, we were able to effectively show how each character affects the acceptability of the string (since a FSA processes only one character at a time). Therefore during the tutorial problems and the quiz, it was quite simple to draw out the possible states: a string with an even number of 1s and an even length, a string with an even number of 1s and an odd length, a string with odd-odd and a string with odd even. Using the statistics method of determining the number of possible permutations, this was a simple task.
Subsequently, we can draw out a table of values - should the next digit to be processed be a 0 (the language was {0, 1}), then we know that the length switches from odd to even or even to odd, and the number of 1s remains consistent. Similarly, should the next digit be a 1, the length switches states and the number of 1s also switches states.
Now we know this, we have our transition function (as represented above), language, acceptable states and starting state, and the set of states (all 4 given in the question). Thus we have our quintuple of parameters. Therefore we have defined our machine! Very simple.
Anyway, with all 236 assignments out of the way, I can relax.
Until next time,
-ラムダ
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