Half an Induction

First off, the test. I found it to be a good test because it was fair. There was no insanely difficult question that math tests are infamous for. All of the questions can be readily answered if lecture material was properly digested. The first question (sets omitting 1, 2 or both} is easily proved with the same method as the "number of subsets = 2^n" example in class. The proof to the second question is obvious when using the standard proof for a > b. The third question was reminiscent of CSC236 questions which isn't so bad.

As for the lecture, finding closed formulas was pretty neat because I found the method for it ingenious for some reason. One thing I'm unsure of is why the family of solutions is formed by a linear combination of the roots. I've learned to accept it something like a fact of life or "because Prof. Heap said so" but I would like to know the reason. The overall algorithm is pretty straightforward though so it makes easy test questions, hopefully.

The induction for sets is very close to the P(n) => P(n+1) type of induction. I find it interesting how something can be so similar yet different at the same time. I find it slightly more difficult than the P(n) => P(n+1) type though since I prefer numbers instead of word explanations, and it seems to be necessary to incorporate at least some of it for find induction for recursively defined sets.

The last thing is my assignment 1 apparently did not submit correctly resulting in a completely unreadable format. At the time of this posting, I have a 0% for it. I think this is very unfortunate since I believe that a mark should reflect understanding of course material and effort given instead of unknown technological errors during submission, especially because I believe the error is not caused by me and/or I have no way to know of this error before it occurs. I think the CDF submission site should have the feature to view the contents of submitted files instead of just listing the files and file sizes which would prevent incidents like this from occurring.. I hope Prof. Heap is able to recover the file and remark it or redistribute the weight of this assignment to other course work.