Week 4: Assignment 1

Well the week continues to be full of learning!

Working on A1 has been a good test of how well I understand the concepts. I found myself often combining all kinds of tests to find answers - many Venn diagrams were drawn before I wrote answers to questions.

I find that I sometimes get confused about what precisely is meant by conjunctions and disjunctions in a statement. When P(d) /\ Q(d), are we talking about the truth of each statement, or the truth of the intersection of those statements? And is there a fundamental difference between those two distinctions?

But I enjoyed trying to come up with symbols for English and English for symbols, perhaps because I've done a lot of language learning over the years and it felt very much like an activity in translation. Even though the symbolic terms like "for all" or "there exists" are not to be used in English, you can get away with usually the same phrases to represent them, although the best was when a complicated logical statement could simply be wrapped up as "the least of some group." That felt very satisfyingly complete and concise.

This will have to be a short week for the CLOG, but we shall see where things go next!