This week was another short week since we had Monday and Tuesday off as part of our reading "week". I find it ironic that our reading week for first semester is only 2 days, but to be fair it is called a break by the university rather than a week. So, since we did not have school on Monday, we also didn't have a quiz this week, and we didn't get our quizzes from last week returned.
This week we learned formal languages and FSAs, also known as Finite State Automatons. FSAs represent "machines" that accept a certain "language". I use quotation marks here because these names represent things other than what they usually represent. A language accepts only a certain set of strings, so we are dealing with sets and subsets once again. Having lots of experience with sets and properties of sets in the past from last year's course, CSC165, and this year's course statistics course, STA247, I feel comfortable with this material and I think I am grasping it fairly well from the very beginning.
I also find FSAs are very logical and systematic in the way that you draw them and analyze them. It is fairly easy if you approach each problem involving an FSA by taking it step by step, either through the the strings that a language accepts, or through the FSA to determine a language that it represents. Another new concept we learned this week was transition functions, which I will have to read some more about because I have to admit, I did not pay complete attention in lecture when this was taught.
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