Aidan Delaney’s weblog

I did a decent amount of study over the weekend, but I have to talk to someone to figure out one or two problems. I did make a sort of plan though. I’ve decided that if I can finish here knowing everything in the Handbook of Formal Languages on regular languages, context free languages, context sensitive languages and the class notes on CD grammar systems I’ll be happy. This means that I won’t be concentrating on things like combinatorics on words, so if the exam is mainly combinatorics, I’m screwed. My decision is based on the presumption that I’m better off studying subjects that will be directly useful for my research and the fact that there is not enough time to study everything. I’ll see how it goes though.

A few of us brought Benedek’s son and daughter to the beach yesterday. Benedek’s son is about five and also called Benedek, his daughter is about three and is nicknamed Pishu which is Hungarian for “little one”. They don’t speak English or Spanish but Benedek (Jr.) speaks a few words of Catalan. Even so, they’re quite funny. Szliard translated some of what they said into English. Anyhow, I only stayed an hour and had a good swim.

I feel like my karma has taken a dive this week. Since the broken oil bottle on Monday, some stupid things have happened. For example I got locked out of my room this morning after my shower. I had to go to the canteen, in only a towel, to ask Guangwu for his keys.

Im getting into a good study routine though. I figured out that the main reason I couldn’t sleep at night was because I was studying right up to the time I went to bed. Now I stop studying about 30 minutes before I go to bed and read one of the novels Lori bought me. I’m reading another Ian M. Banks book “Against a dark background” at the moment. So far it’s actually better than “Use of weapons”. The Pratchett book, “Strata”, was awful.

I got up early yesterday, to prepare myself for a long week of good study. Little did I know that Monday had it in for me. I droppend and smashed a bottle of olive oil at breakfast (all over my new trousers), I missed the bus as I got lost looking for the ticket station (that I’ve been to many times). Got to college only to find out that I needn’t have gotten up as the Prof. wouldn’t be in ’till 4:00. Sweltered in the heat trying to figure out the Myhill-Nerode and Chomsky-Schutzenberger theorems.

Any person with half a clue about formal language theory should, at this stage, be decrying me as an idiot. The Myhill-Nerode theorem is easy, it’s undergrad stuff. However, I was trying to understand the relation between the Myhill-Nerode theorem and the syntactic monoid of a rational language. That again is quite easy. The equation is V*/~L (where the L is in subscript). Unfortunatly it dosn’t say anywhere that the / operator is different from the normal meaning of the / operator (the right quotient operator). Futhermore, I’ve still not seen an example of how to divide a set by a relation, which is what the first operation suggests. I suppose I should keep looking…

Here’s hoping that today is a bit better