For the second week, we covered the topic of Complete induction.
At first I wasn't really clear about the concept of complete induction. After the examples we did in class, the clouds started to disappear but not completely. I was a bit confused with the chocolar bar example, as I wasn't sure what it meant by "break". It required me to reread the example several times before I came to understand it better. Sometimes, the wording was not so clear.
The postage example was interesting. We did a similar one in 165 last term but with simple induction if I remembered correctly. To be honest, I'm not fond of this problem. When we were asked to do some scratch works, I did it and thought that I had got some clues about it. But as we took it up as a class, I found that my clues was not as well as I thought. And to find that Problem Set #2 is about the postage frightened me a bit; although after reading through the textbook and the class notes, it was not that bad.
The most challenging part right now is to be able to believe that P(n) is true and find the reason to back my belief.
Monday, September 22, 2008
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The postage stamp problem is a classic, but perhaps not too well-expressed.
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