Roach, Steven

CS 5382-26502

Spring 2003

Comments:

1. The course was interesting. It challenged us to think deeply for understanding a problem definition. Dr. Roach was very helpful but sometimes hard to understand. It was a hard class.

2. Overall, I enjoyed your class. There was something that I did not like. Some of the work was unfeasible. I am the kind of student that likes to finish my assignments and the 31 proof were just too many. I think it would have been more beneficial if you would have picked a few of them or at least told us up front that we were not going to finish them. Knowing that you were expecting them was really stressful when I knew I was not even close overall I learned that I could at the end.

In graduate school, I feel that it is reasonable to ask you to attempt difficult problems. I am as interested in the thought process as the final result.

3. This course was really challenging because the ACL-2 subject matter was very new to me, and I had no previous experience with LISP. However, I feel that the assignment allowed me to learn a lot about LISP and ACL-2. I feel that I am more confident about using recursion and about providing theorems. I’m glad I took the course. It was hard, but worth it.

4. I would have liked to follow that implementation of some well known algorithm such as the graph theory or something more advance. Having spend less time in manual proves would have give us a better chance on going further in the use of ACL-2.

Attempting to use ACL2 without having a solid understanding of induction is a folly. ACL2 is hard to use, even if you do understand induction. The projects were intended to give you the opportunity to experiment with more advanced topics.

5. Overall I enjoyed this class. I’d like to do more work with ACL-2. We probably should have spent less time doing hand written proofs to spend more with ACL-2.

See my response to the previous comment.

6. Dr. Roach is one of the professors that like to teach new stuff. He always looks for new promising topic and takes the challenge to teach them. This class was a new and hard one. Even though he was successful to some extend to make it challenging.

7. This class was good. It helped me understand theorem proving. Also, it helped me determine the path I want to go in my graduate studies.

8. Good teaching strategy. I liked ACL-2, I think more information on the tutorial website about how to prove theorems ( proving something easier) would be useful

The proofs that I asked you to complete using ACL2 are among the easiest. I did tell you about the tutorial web site, and we walked through one of the examples in class.

9. I believe it would have been better to start of with even more small proofs closer to the beginning of the semester rather than start on not so small proofs all the way up to about the middle of the semester. Also using ACL-2 needed to have been started a bit sooner. Perhaps tutorials on how to read the ACL-2 output would have helped a lot.

As I said before, the proofs I asked you to do are among the easiest. The 31 hand proofs were assigned in January, and I don’t see how I could have assigned more of them any earlier. You must understand induction before you can attempt to use ACL2. Fares did give a lecture on reading ACL2 output for failed proofs.

10. I enjoyed the way this course was taught. The only way I was going to learn how to use ACL-2 is to assume you didn’t know how to use it yourself.

I edited this comment. This is a forum for discussion of courses I teach and the conduct of those courses. It is not a forum for personal comments about your fellow students. In the future, I hope you will provide comments that are related to the course.

11. When I came into this course, i was not very good at proving theorems, especially by induction. This course really helped me break sown the process of proving theorems and introduced a good tool to use for my future work. I thoroughly enjoyed the teaching style used by the professor because he guided us along the process of solving problems.

12. Dr. Roach is maybe the most interesting professor I’ve taken classes with. The reason for this is he’s really concerned about us learning the material more then grading the H.W. and exams to punish us. I would have liked of Dr. Roach was more specific about what we need to do for our exams and especially the final.

I thought that in a course titled “Induction and Recursion” that asking you to write recursive programs and provide proofs by induction would be reasonable on the exams, particularly the take home exams. Asking you to use ACL2 to prove theorems seemed appropriate for the final. I reviewed the questions on the midterm and final, and I find it hard to believe that the questions were unclear.