one thousand!

It has been a really long while since I have last updated. I was waiting for this moment. Finally I've broken the 1000 problem mark (My 1000th was a nice problem with an interesting solution that involves binary search). Next "nice" number will be 1024.

If you look hard at the statistics, more than half of the solutions are in C++, that means those problems are probably solved after NS. That was the time I changed from using plain vanilla C and hand-coded data structures to abusing C++ STL data structures (under g++, stl set and map are implemented as a red-black tree, a balanced binary search tree).

There has been a problem that has been bothering me. I probably cannot solve it myself due to my terrible problem solving skills in probability. What is the expected waiting time of a bus at a bus stop at a given time, given that you have all the statistics like published timetable of the buses leaving the bus interchange and so on. Now, suppose you are waiting for 2 buses instead of 1. What about 3? How does it generalize?

Speaking of this problem, CK was telling me that our education system has turned us into impatient problem solvers. We are guided by parts in the question to solve problems. However, in the real world, we are bombarded with too many information and we need to filter out the useless information and make use of the correct information to solve the problem. Recently I was asked by Prof Chan to give a proof of why the center of a p-group is non-trivial. It was like I completely forgotten all about Algebra. Only when he gave the hint "class equation", I remembered how to prove it.

These days I am very confused. I do not know what I want to do in the future. However, I know what I do not want to do in the future. 2 years to graduation. I wonder what lies ahead. I wish I have a clear idea of what I want. I know my short term goal for now is to qualify for world finals. I have given up SEP for it. Lets just hope my sacrifice was worth it. (Adhiraj and Hung, lets qualify!)

There is an interesting article on quarterlife crisis.

Protest in KL

I managed to witness another protest. This time round it is a pro-Palestine protest in KL and it caused me to be stuck in a terrible traffic jam on a bus. Thankfully, I've brought along a SD-card reader. Enjoy.

feedback

Results were out on Monday and I got a shock of my life. As always I will do a feedback of the modules I took in the semester.

CS2100 (Computer Organisation)
I didn't like CS2100 as it didn't teach me much. Furthermore, I feel that its papers are just a gauge of whether you are careless or not careless. I have jokingly told my friend that he is less careless compared to me as he got A+. I gave a bad cors feedback for my tutor as he didn't start on time (his previous lesson will drag on) and I have to leave early to attend my MA2202S lecture on time.

MA2202S (Algebra)
I like this module as it introduced me to the interesting world of algebra and I spent a lot of time on this module. Professor Loke is a pretty decent lecturer and he treated us to dinner on his last lesson with us. However, the final paper was a killer and I think I've only gotten 50% of the paper correct.

MA3111S (Complex Analysis)
I must say that I've put in the least amount of effort for the module among all the math modules. The reason is because MA2202S and MA3265 sucked up all my time. I didn't have time to do the tutorials and I only started catching up on the tutorials before finals and midterms. I wonder at times whether I did better than Xiaojie for this module. I'm glad that I didn't do too badly for the finals.

MA3265 (Introduction to Number Theory)
The workload for this module is quite heavy as Prof Chan expects us to submit 7 problems from the tutorials every Monday. I think the grader for the module didn't do his/her job properly and quite a number of times I feel that my scripts were graded wrongly. I'm rather shocked by the grade I got for this module as I felt that 2 other guys might have done better than me for the final paper as I've made a minor screw-up and didn't manage to think of an answer for a question (which I probably couldn't think of it anyway because I didn't really study for this module). The final paper consists mainly of problems from the tutorials except one or two more challenging questions.

SS2202 (Changing Landscapes of Singapore)
Changing Landscape gave me the biggest shock as I was expecting myself to get like C+/B- so that I can SU the module and get on with life. However, it turns out that I got A- for the module without really studying for it (Does reading the notes 2h before the paper count as studying?). Furthermore, I've just barely passed my midterms (15/30). I've asked around and it turned out that 2 of my friends got A-. It's quite amusing because I definitely put in less effort than them. One claimed that we got A- because of our project work. I guess I've to shelf the idea of SUing this module.