Week 2: Negation, conjunction, disjunction and tabulating truth

Hello Rod here,

Standard Negation
This week we explored negation more. I learned standard negation and I was surprised how negation changes a universal statement to a existential statement. Or if we are negating [P(x) => Q(x)] it can be equally expressed as a conjunction and as a single negation on Q: [P(x) ^ (negation)Q(x)].

Conjunction and Disjunction
I just learned these symbols this week. What helps me to remember them well is think of conjunction as the python syntax 'and' and think as disjunction as 'or.' This helps me in determining whether the entire expression would be true or not. So far this has been really helpful.

Tabulating Truth
Personally I was glad to have learned tabulating truth as a method to help better understand claims. I found the venn diagrams hard to read or visualize and when we started tabulating predicates it made a lot of sense and helped me identify the situations where the entire expression would be false or true.

This week what i has trouble with was the first set of questions on the tutorial #2 exercise. I found it difficult to translate the English claims into logical symbols at first. But at the start of the tutorial, soon as we took up two of them I was able to do all of them easily. I felt like I learned a lot from that tutorial and that as if I was learning a new language, as soon as I got the hang of understanding a few logical symbols and their placement to make the claim represent the english claim then the rest came very naturally for me.

This week was tough but I learned many things.