Thoughts Thinking

Well, I just woke up from a nice nap...in my A.I. class. Bleh. I hate falling asleep during lecture, especially when it's an interesting class covering stuff I haven't learned before. This is such a cozy auditorium, and I just had lunch, and they turned the lights way down...mmmm. The only saving grace here is that the lecturer uses nice function names in his code, like computePathWithReuse() so catching up isn't totally impossible.

The lecture today is being given by a guy who did some work on Red Team, talking about search-based planning in dynamic environments (ie, a robot trying to find the optimal path to a goal as it moves along.)

Hmm. I really like my classes this semester. I've found a lot to think about in all of them...and I think I'm getting back over the "How To Think" hurdle I seem to run into at the start of each semester.

I spent the larger part of Sunday trying to do a 213 assignment...basically a bunch of puzzles that we have to solve using bitwise operations. I didn't get much actually accomplished on Sunday, besides sitting around in frustration trying to figure out how to even...start. I'm not sure what the issue was; it was like I just couldn't even remember how to start thinking about the problems logically. After talking about one of the problems with a friend of mine, I had a bit of a realization - how to think about bits and binary representations, how to abstract myself from the integers and just express logic using the operators, and how to use the outcome of a problem to force the solution. I sat back down with it last night and got through nearly half of the assignment in about two hours. And that was even with a panda trying to distract me.

It's always a relief, and really satisfying to have those breakthroughs...I've always wondered what's going to happen if one day I just don't "get it", though.

Anyway. Matt sent me a copy of "Waking Life" and so hopefully I'll get to watch that tonight. He seemed pretty blown away by it...we'll see. I haven't found another human being who's even heard of it, much less seen it. :-P