Way back in the day of CSC165 (like, 6 whole months ago!), I have a feeling my TA didn't like me very much. Whenever an assignment was due, I would fire up my scanner and throw in whatever paper I managed to scribble my proofs on to. The result was a huge, disorganized and fairly illegible PDF. This year, I decided to give my TA a break and dive in to the exciting world of typesetting.
I decided to use LyX (a LaTeX based document processor), as it seemed the most user-friendly. At first, I was a little overwhelmed by the whole system. I found myself spamming the enter key and tab, wondering why my white space wasn't appearing! It wasn't until I generated the PDF that I had that "oohhhh" moment, and finally began to understand the whole WYSIWYM paradigm.
As for the content of A1, I can't say I was surprised. The assignment was longer, and the proofs more complicated, than those of CSC165, but in that class we had an assignment nearly every week. The first three problems seemed very similar to those in we have seen in lecture, with only minor changes (for example, ternary trees instead of binary).
The fourth problem seemed to be the most unusual (and the most interesting). Originally, I had tried to simply solve the claim as given, but the induction step of this claim was too difficult for me to resolve. I was lost until I reread the question, and finally took the hint that I needed to change the claim. After considering all types of binary strings, the proof was laying right there in front of me, and with some cases and a little ingenuity I think I was able to bring it home.
It seems weird that a stronger claim would be easier to prove than a weaker one, but one thing I learned is that in mathematics, you can't always trust your instincts.
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